Vista - Control panel, aero, games and alt+tab stopped working

Okay, so last week or so I was cleaning up my msconfig startup options,
removing the third-party programs that sometimes likes to start up with
Windows.

After this and doing a restart to make sure I had disabled the stuff I
wanted, I noticed that Aero and alt-tab wasn't working. This didn't worry me
a bit since I just thought that I might have disabled some of the needed
files for my nVidia graphics card - so I went to their website and downloaded
the latest driver.

After installing it and restarting it, it didn't help - then I noticed that
Personalize (From the right-click menu on the desktop) didn't work either. So
I went to the control panel, only to find that it wasn't working either (and
the menu in my Start-menu was empty of entries in the Control Panel
selection).

So this week I decide to do a bit of digging around on the internet to see
if other people have encountered similar problems and I find that some have
had problems with drivers (mostly ati, nvidia and intel graphics drivers)
messing up the licensing service of Windows Vista. So I completely removed
the graphics drivers of my nvidia card and installed them again - no success.

I have also tried system restore with absolutely no change except a few
programs are now not in my registry.

So now I'm left with the problem that the licensing service (and the
messaging service that's linked to the licensing service) aren't working - or
I should say, the licensing service starts like it should, but the licensing
messaging service doesn't and that's (apparently what's causing my problems,
since Vista thinks it's now an expired trial license, and thus it has
disabled the features, like it's supposed to - or that's what I can piece
together, at least).

Thus, I'm asking if anyone knows of a solution to this problem that doesn't
involve me reinstalling Windows Vista as this is a rather tedious task I
don't want to have to do (since I'm triple-booting on OSX and FreeBSD and
using Windows boot manager to do so)..

So please help me..

You probably run an OEM preinstalled machine, and they have the licensing
app run from startup. Mine is a dell, and has "EULALauncher" visible in Task
Manager processes.

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Mark L. Ferguson

..
"D. Ebdrup" <DEbdrup@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:14DD516C-659A-4628-B7E0-0D1157DF156D@xxxxxx

No, I don't have an oen preinstalled machine. I built it myself and bought an
oem license as danish law permits when buying new essential hardware, so even
though it it an oem license, it's on a fresh install with no oem tools of any
kind.

"Mark L. Ferguson" wrote: