Scanner Service not starting

My brother's Win8.1 system has Spybot 2 installed, but latelt the Scanner Service has not been starting. It is set in the settings to start at boot, but the settings screen shows it as not running. If I click on the "start" button, it comes back with an error icon, and doesn't start. I'd like to verify this is not an infection intercepting the scanner, rather than just a bug in the software or a damaged install.

There is an error dialogue at bootup as well, I can't tell what it's from, since half the text is highbit characters; it starts with "ControlService:" and ends with "1053".

I'm rather limited on what I can do with the system myself, since it's a couple hours away from here, and I can only access it through TeamViewer.

That might be this error: "Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion."
That error usually happens when a service doesn't start within x amount of millseconds.
You can increase the milliseconds by editing the registry,but I'm not sure you could do that with Team Viewer,and I'm not entirely familiar with Windows 8.1.