Remote Assitance fixes application problems....but why?

[bmg]

Over the past few days, every morning a number of users have trouble running applications on their Windows XP SP1 machines. The applications that have trouble running vary from all Office 2003 products to our main practice managment system to custom applications. The problem seemed happened over night. We have considered updates from Webroot, Trend Officescan, Windows Update Server and our SMS server, but we can duplicate the problem when we load all previous versions from our Ghost Image. When a Domain Admin logs into the same computer, the apps work fine. What we found by accident is that when a domain admin offers remote assitance or an end user requests remote assitance, the application all of sudden start to work. The actual invitation doesn't even need to take place, the Remote Assistance App just needs to run and then close out right out. At that point, all apps work properly. As soon as the user logs out and back in, the same symptoms start up again. They Run Remote Assitance, close it and they are good to go again.

Obvioulsy we need to fix this for our users. Remote Assitance is doing something to allow this users to start to run their apps again. We have no idea what though. Any thoughts on this would be helpful.

Thanks.