By "bogus" I meant that the code wasn't part of any legitimate program. I'm sure Dr Watson was accurately reporting what it found.

It's possible to install Xara X with its DLLs in other directories and that may have happened in the past on your system. The registry may continue to refer to those DLLs so it's important to delete everything to be sure. It's extra thorough but your problem is extra tricky! A registry search for "xara" should be enough to catch all the entries, so long as you search the keys, values and data.

The Win2K security patch could have elements that might be the cause, but why hasn't anyone noticed before? Does the system on which you were able to install X have the patch (assuming it uses Win2K)? Could you try to install it on another machine with the patch?

Regards - Sean