I know this is an old thread but the mystery was cleared up and I wanted to
let you know what happened.

As a reminder, I was having problems right after an upgrade from XP Home to
XP Pro. I was getting all sorts of problems from all sorts of applications.

The problem turned out to be with IE and the upgrade.

I had installed IE7 on my XP Home system. The upgrade CD had IE6. I've
come to learn that what I should have done was uninstall IE7 and then do the
upgrade (or MSFT should have made the install "smarter" to see IE7 and not
try to install IE6 components).

The problems this causes showed up in all sorts of places including Out of
Box. Almost all HELP tools failed or gave strange results.

I ended up doing a full install which, of course, installed IE6 cleanly.