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All services suddenly were disabled in Windows XP Service Pack 3

I recently upgraded a computer to Windows XP Service Pack 3.  It's been running fine until today when suddenly nothing would work. I looked in the services.msc and almost everything was set to disabled.  I checked msconfig and everything was set to run in normal mode.  I went through and set everything back to automatic.  Any idea what might have happened?

Besides SP3 the only other changes were to remove AOL 9.0.

Thanks.
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alikaz3
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spyware/malware? have you done an antivirus scan lately?
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Sorry I should have mentioned I looked for spyware and viruses etc, I have Symantec End Point Protection 11 and do a daily scan no issues have ever been found.  Thanks for the suggestion.
Glad to help, there is the possibility that AOL did it. Maybe it did for the uninstall process set them all to disabled, then upon rebooting it would re-enable them (perhaps with some batch file). AOL works in mysterious ways...
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What would AOL do to disable every service?  If it was not AOL what else can cause this to happen?  
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It's definatelt not AOL as it happened again and AOL was uninstalled long ago, I ran another virus scan and all is clean.  Anyone else have other ideas?
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alikaz3
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I've run every online virus scan, I ran mcafee and norton with updated virus definitaions from dos as well as spybot and ad-aware and there is not a single infection or issue found.  I guess I'll need to reformat and start from scratch but I'm still not sure what is causing the issue.
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Thanks for the help.
I know this topic is closed, but I'm experiencing the same problem. Service Pack 3 has given some strange problems before, such as messing up USB devices, (you plug in a usb device, and it would blue screen the PC. After removing SP3, computer was back to normal. Apparently there's some new code that affects the usb driver.)

But in this case, the option to add/remove service pack 3 is not available. Have you been able to try to remove SP3 to see if  that works? I'd hate to reformat, but of course if that's the only option it will have to be done.
G'day All,

Me too. I can't believe it!! there wasn't much on the machine at all. I'm sick of doing WinXP reinstalls. I'll be turning on the "Restore" feature from now on.

I have a Sony VIAO - WinXP SP3 AVG and MS Office 2003

Cheers,

Arthur