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I experienced the exact issue as described above, including the inactive taskbar and the slow boot. I know this post has been around for a while, but thought I'd confirm I fixed it with the below: I found that there was a file called "SVCHOST" around 2kb in length in the same folder as the "SVCHOST.EXE" executable in %systemroot%\SYSTEM32. Having opened this file in Notepad because it had no extension, it appeared to refer in the jumble of characters in a shortcut to an application I had installed on the previous boot. I've not idea why this file was created, but once I'd removed it by bringing up a Command Prompt window from Task Manager (one of the few things I could get XP to display correctly) I was able to first move, then delete the file. Once I'd rebooted, everything came back correctly. I originally just wanted to run System Restore once I'd identified the slow boot process, but that service wouldn't start even in Safe Mode, which pointed me to a dependency that couldn't start either, which led me to the "Could not start the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) service on Local Computer. Error 193: 0xc1" prompt. I guess the same applies if their is a file called "WINDOWS" in the root of C:, or a file called "SYSTEM32" in the Windows folder etc. Whether this is the same for other services as above in this post I don't know, but I hope this helps somebody as it did me, as this error only gets four Google hits today!