The Rivetess' odd occurrence.

[Loose rivets]

Late at night, and the Rivetess come into my den and reports her HP6000 laptop goes into a loop of starting and shutting down. I get rare permission to enter her den.

Vista Home Premium. ( I know. )

Sure enough, 70 seconds after the cursor arrow first appears, it goes into Reboot.

Safe mode: okay. Back into Normal Boot.

Task manager seems normal, but as I was looking at the Processes list, AdInUtil.exe suddenly appeared and it shut down again.

Another go, and I've just got time to try to end its process. It denies me permission to do this, and me time's up.

I recover to an earlier time, and all's well.

But just what is this ethereal AdInUtil.exe all about?

[Milo Minderbinder]

apparently part of .Net framework - which could make repairing it a real PITA

I'd try booting to safe mode, do as system restore and then scan it for malware using Hitman Pro