I was recently given a laptop to fix that had stopped being able to make a dialup connection; every time it tried, it claimed that the modem was missing.

When I attempted to check the modem in Device Manager, there was a blank window instead of the usual list of devices.

Microsoft has a knowledge base article that appears to describe this behavior, but their fix is to make sure the Plug and Play service is running, and it was; so no help there.

Finding that the Device Manager worked properly in Safe Mode, I checked the list of services running in Safe mode and ensured that the same services were also running in normal mode; they were.

Spybot S&D 1.4 with the latest detection rules found no threats. I used the System Startup tool to turn off all the registry-run and Start menu startup items, which still got me nowhere (I left the system.ini items on as they all looked standard, and turning those off has broken things for me before now).

Finally, following advice posted on the Tech Republic forum by pugman2, I went to Add/Remove Programs, found an item called "contextplus", clicked Remove, and rebooted. The Device Manager and dialup were both restored to normal.

Has anybody else here seen contextplus cause trouble?

Are there any plans to make SS&D detect and remove it?

What else can I safely turn off, next time I want to track down a problem that doesn't occur in Safe mode?

Thanks to Pepi and Team Spybot for making such fantastically useful software available.