startkiller causes dwwin.exe on windows shutdown

ever since i installed StartKiller (about 10 min ago), i've been getting the following error during shutdown, recorded in the event log:

-----------------------------------------------------------
Event Type: Information
Event Source: Application Popup
Event Category: None
Event ID: 26
Date: 8/26/2004
Time: 1:19:43 AM
User: N/A
Description:
Application popup: dwwin.exe - DLL Initialization Failed : The application failed to initialize because the window station is shutting down.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
-----------------------------------------------------------

and my explorer will sometimes come back up with a disabled active desktop when it comes back up from reboot. any ideas?

thanks.

Yeah, disable Dr. Watson: it's useless and you'll no longer get silly errors...

it seems to me that as none of the other programs i use, whether commercially offered, shareware, or freeware, final or beta, cause problems with dr watson, that the problem is not that i'm running something i shouldn't be, but that there's a problem with StartKiller.

i've noticed also in the forums that StartKiller is notably unstable. in fact, after rebooting my computer a couple times, i found that startkiller was completely hanging my taskbar, even before shutdown. there's clearly some problem here.

Most users have no problem with start killer. It's very stable on all my machines.

You probably have some hardware or software conflict. Try it on a basic setup.

StartKiller is stable in most cases. But there are some software that can conflict with StartKiller. One of them is TClock and any other software that allow to modify the tray area.

Dr. Watson is application that windows runs when any program crashes. So there no conflicts with Dr. Watson (may be Dr. Watson is incorrectly configured on yuor computer).

Hey, Yuri -- i've recently reinstalled everything on my computer, and hoped that this would fix the problem reported in this post.

I'm still getting the dwwin error, and often get an "active desktop recovery" problem when i've rebooted the computer.

These errors only occur if StartKiller is running when the system shuts down. if i do not run StartKiller, or if i exit StartKiller before shutting down, the problems do not occur. This leads me to believe that the problem is with StartKiller. any thoughts as to what shutdown processes StartKiller might interfere with?

Maybe there are conflict with other application? Do you use something that change systray, taskbar or Start Menu?

I have been using StartKiller for years with no problems.. I also run PresStart and Lock Windows ( <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.dr-hoiby.com/LockWindows/index.php">http://www.dr-hoiby.com/LockWindows/index.php</a><!-- m --> )

It has to be a conflict with something else you are running.
Which is were the fun part comes in; lol

ah-ha! it turns out that my computer was experiencing the problem described here:

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;837115">http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... -us;837115</a><!-- m -->

and microsoft has created a program to fix it. looks like i'm all set, now, though i'm still not sure why startkiller was involved with the problem.

sorry for any inconvenience.

oops. that fix didn't last more than a couple reboots. but, i've found the conflict:

i'm using an IBM thinkpad, and they have this excellent utility for network connection profile management called "ThinkVantage Access Connections" -- i'll call it TAC, for short.

if i shut down with both startkiller and TAC running, i get the error always.

if i close either startkiller or TAC before shutting down, i rarely get an error.

if i kill explorer.exe from the task manager and then shut down, no error.

so, if there's a way i can kill startkiller.exe from the command line, i can write a little batch file to kill it and then call a shutdown. if i use this instead of the windows shutdown, the problem should be averted.

or, maybe there's a way to make startkiller unload more cleanly on shutdown?