Disappearing control panel/welcome center

I have a brand new PC with Vista Home Premium installed.

Everything was working fine until I connected it to the internet and
downloaded all of the pending updates to Vista and my antivirus program
(McAfee).

Since then, when I log in the welcome center no longer comes up, and
attempts to open the control panel result in a window flashing open and then
closing right away.

I searched online and found that if I restart the "Software Licensing"
service (which also restarts the ReadyBoost service) and start the "SL UI
Notification Service", it fixes things until the next time that I reboot.

Needless to say I would prefer not to have to do this every time I boot.

I know that I can write a script to do this and even schedule the script to
run automatically when I log in, but this seems to be a common problem
(especially for people with a G965 based motherboard) that I shouldn't have
to create a hack to work around.

Is there an official Microsoft fix for this problem currently available?

Thanks,

Simcha-Yitzchak Lerner

"Simcha-Yitzchak Lerner" <> wrote in message
news:...
>I have a brand new PC with Vista Home Premium installed.
>
> Everything was working fine until I connected it to the internet and
> downloaded all of the pending updates to Vista and my antivirus program
> (McAfee).
>
> Since then, when I log in the welcome center no longer comes up, and
> attempts to open the control panel result in a window flashing open and
> then closing right away.
>
> I searched online and found that if I restart the "Software Licensing"
> service (which also restarts the ReadyBoost service) and start the "SL UI
> Notification Service", it fixes things until the next time that I reboot.
>
> Needless to say I would prefer not to have to do this every time I boot.
>
> I know that I can write a script to do this and even schedule the script
> to run automatically when I log in, but this seems to be a common problem
> (especially for people with a G965 based motherboard) that I shouldn't
> have to create a hack to work around.
>
> Is there an official Microsoft fix for this problem currently available?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Simcha-Yitzchak Lerner
>

Just in case others are having this problem, I seem to have found two
solutions.

First off, in the Microsoft KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936686 ,
there is a hot fix available that indeed fixed the problem for me.

I know that this problem was reproducible on my PC, because I had
reinstalled Vista on my PC the first few times this happened (thinking that
I had done something to break Vista), and it reappeared as soon as I
downloaded updates.

After having downloaded and installed the hot fix and finding everything
back to as it should be, I decided to upgrade my system to a discrete video
card instead of the G965 (GMA X3000) integrated graphics.

I reloaded Vista (something that I am becoming expert at) and this time,
when the updates downloaded and installed, my control panel didn't break.

So for whatever it's worth, it seems that this problem *may* be related to
using the integrated G965/X3000 graphics controller.

Simcha-Yitzchak Lerner