Vista - Viiv problem: Intel Alert Service Stopped Working

A few days ago (May 15th) I started getting a message on bootup that the
Intel Alert System has stopped working. I can no longer run Intel Viiv
settings. I do not see the Viiv icon icon on the sask bar.

If I restart the Alert Service it dies again as soon as I try and run the
Viiv settings or reboot.

I have tried unistalling and reinstalling Viiv 1.6 but this does not help.
I have also tried using system resore to go back to 5th May. At first after
this it started working again, but the next day it stopped again. Overnight
windows update has installed a whole bunch of new stuff again - I think an
update may be fouling up Viiv??

So far the "check to see if Microsoft has a solution to this problem"
process has not found a solution.

Any ideas?