Getting Internet explorer error message & IE works fine

I'm working on a dell deminsion 2400 with win xp pro sp2 and when the machine boots up an error message says "Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience. if you were in the middle of something, the information you were working on might be lost." and it has a close button and thats it. and IE is not even open. no details button, no send error report, nothing. and when you click close, it just comes back in a few seconds. the error is generated by dwwin.exe which i found out is Dr. Watson. this computer was infected with viruses and spy/adware. my boss cleaned some of it off of there on-site, then brought it back in-house for me to finish, so i'm not 100% sure what all viruses were on here. i cleaned mainly spy/adware off of it and have ran these programs in safe and normal mode: trend micro housecall, panda active scan, norton internet security 05, trendmicro spyware scan, x-cleaner, adaware, spybot, hijackthis, & ccleaner.
i have also ran the repair twice, ran the system file checker, chkdsk with all the switches. i have turned off error reporting and still get the message and internet explorer works fine. all programs work fine. i followed microsoft knowledge directions to uninstall IE in the registry and to turn off dr watson with no good results. i really don't want to reload the os because i will have to backup a lot of files and reload a lot of software and besides everything works fine i just can't get rid of the message. ANY ideas or thoughts would really be appreciated.

 

Do you get this error in safe mode?

Also, try opening up msconfig and turning off all the startup items. Does this help? If it does, I'd look to see what programs you are running that may be causing this issue.

 

i don't get the error in safe mode and i ran msconfig and put startup in diagnostic mode and still get the error when i boot up
could this be because of a windows service?
the only services running in diagnostic mode are dcom, rpc & rpc locator and i think that one of the rpc services doesn't load in safe mode