RPC server not available: Interesting problem

Greetings everyone,
I decided yesterday it was a good idea to install win xp on my win 2000 machine ( basically thats my gaming machine so its not a network machine ) so now i have two operating systems on my machine of which i can chose which to load on start up.
When i start win xp everything seems fine but i still need to install most of the drivers for the graphics card and other bits. The problem comes when i want to install just about anything really. I get an error message "Windows installer cannot start: RPC server not available". :major My first thought was ok maybe the service isnt running so i opened up services from administrative tools and checked to see if it was actually running and it was.
Im really stumped can anyone please help me.confused
I'd appreciate it very much thnx

 

post exact error message,with the error number.

 

start>controlpanel>administrativetools>services

Remote Proceedure Call(RPC) should be started and set to automatic

Remote Proceedure Call(RPC) locator may be stopped and set to manual
start this second service and reboot.

 

Thanx for the quick reply guys...
actually what studiot said was the first thing i tried, thats why im stumped confused... Im not at home right now ill get the exact error message asap and post it. I was thinking that it may be an installation error, you thats possible ?

 

Setup failed to launch installation engine:
The RPC Server is unavailable.

 

Look at
c:\windows\system32\rpcss.dll

It should be 398,848 bytes

Try extracting another copy.