Group Policy Client problem!

Anyone know why I get this error (pop-up window in system tray) every time I
boot Vista Business 32bit?

"Cannot connect to Group Policy Client service ".

I am on a domain, logging in as administrator and the computer/network
otherwise works perfectly. This started several months ago, and I cannot
find a restore point to go back to before then.

If I start up services.msi, Group Services Client is not running, and all
options to start , stop it etc are grey'd out?

I have googled and searched for hours and cannot find anything on this
error. A Vista reinstall for this laptop would be a huge undertaking. Any
have ANY ideas (I am even tempted to pay $59 for MS Support but not sure how
useful it will be?)

Here is Event Log data:

Reason: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a
timely fashion.
Details:

[ Name] Service Control Manager
[ Guid] {555908D1-A6D7-4695-8E1E-26931D2012F4}
[ EventSourceName] Service Control Manager
- EventID 7000
[ Qualifiers] 49152

Version 0
Level 2
Task 0
Opcode 0

Keywords 0x80000000000000

- TimeCreated
[ SystemTime] 2008-07-23T01:39:42.000Z

EventRecordID 46478
Correlation
- Execution
[ ProcessID] 0
[ ThreadID] 0

Channel System
Computer SEN006.Sen.local

Security

- EventData

param1 Group Policy Client
param2 %%1053

Interesting. You haven't made any changes to that service, have you,
such as changing the account it runs under? It should be running as
LocalSystem so that would be something to check. Normally that service
is hardened such that it cannot be stopped at all by a regular
administrator.


--
gpoguy