Some badly written programs can interfere adversely with fundamental Windows XP operation. The initial symptom was that no dialog box appeared when trying to start System properties, by right-clicking on My Computer and selecting Properties. This dialog box is particularly useful for changing the computer name (hostname) or workgroup membership.

It was found that by terminating the task rundll32 from Task Manager, the dialog box would appear.

Later we found that the program restore.exe under c:\windows was causing the problem.

Its unclear at this time whether the restore.exe is malware or simply badly written software.