Until sometime in early December, I had a wonderfully functioning XP-64 system. It was configured to auto download/install MS patches. I occassionally update the software on it, e.g. Open Office, Adobe Reader, Skype, but I don't fetch hundreds of tools or anything much beyond what I just mentioned.

In December, suddenly my audio stopped, and drive letters assigned to various mount points on other machines quit being available. Apparantly, the services that support these (and some others) are now not starting up when I boot/login. There isn't anything obvious in the event log. If I manually restart the associated services, these facilities come back on line and work for awhile (a day) but pretty soon the problem reappears. I don't reboot very often, nor do I log out out much.

Hints?