don't know if you've figured this out yet, but even if you have this info might be good for someone else..
i'm 99.999% certain your problem is caused by running Norton AntiVirus 2002 and ZoneAlarm simultaneously. The 2 just WILL NOT play nicely together, and produce this exact error under XP.
Unfortunately, the only solution I've found is to uninstall one of them. On my system, I've removed ZoneAlarm.
Hope this helps.