Hi, I have a Acer Aspire laptop and there has been this continuous problem with applications failing to initialize. When I first start my laptop and I reach the blue Win XP welcome screen a window suddenly pops up and says that "userinit.exe" failed to initialize, click to terminate. I click twice and then the window closes. After the blue welcome screen I see my desktop wallpaper but nothing else. I wait for a while and nothing seems to load. I open up Task manager and then I have to type in and manually run "explorer.exe" before it starts loading my desktop icons (usually it does this automatically). A little while after my desktop loads, another window pops up and says that "rundll32.exe" failed to initialize, click to terminate. I get this window popping up every now and then....when I surf the web, open a new tab in my browser, start a app etc I went and searched on the internet for some help and some suggested doing something in command prompt. So I try to go and open command prompt, I see the usual black window for command prompt but then before I can type anything, another window pops up saying that "cmd.exe" failed to initialize. I tried to change my desktop so I right-clicked on the desktop and selected properties - but then the "rundll32.exe" application error (failed to initialize) window came up again. Another odd thing that happened happened when I was just doing stuff on my laptop, I suddenly notice that a program (utorrent) had been started. I don't have utorrent start during startup and I certainly didn't start the application myself - but somehow it just came on... I've scanned the computer with most of the recommended programs like adware and I removed the problem files. I also scanned it with Spyhunter and picked up a array of webhancers and trackware. They were deleted though I'm not sure if any still remain. I also scanned with Sysclean - miraculously, that scan lasted for over 40 mins and it picked up nothing at all. I'm getting really concerned and annoyed with this lack of control over the applications on my laptop. Could someone please offer some advice? Thanks in advance.

Anti virus programs and the like, just can't keep up with all the malicious code that's being put in the wild. You either have to go into the registry and find it yourself or run Hijack This and see what's there that doesn't belong. Take a look at startup in msconfig too.

Try winpatrol and see what is all running on startup and you have the option to turn them off if you have to. Some HELP in posting on Computing.net plus free progs and instructions Cheers

did you download SP3 by chance?