Well, as long as you guys are here, I went for the Windows update notification that popped up, and now I can't browse through my documents to attach one to an email. I don't know if I have the Service Pac thing, but where can I check on that, if you happen to know. ;(
I don't know what is causing your problem, but I do know that update notification is one of the first things I turned off on my XPpro install....along with indexing and autorestore and all that phonehome crap and so forth. Behind a hardware firewall, I don't update XP at all. Updates often cause more trouble than they are worth.