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I have a Dell Inspiron 5100 with Windows XP Home Edition. One day when Poker Grapher stopped working I tried to access Windows Update. I couldn't. I got error number 0x8024D00C. After doing some research online I discovered that I may need a certain critical update. The problem is that I can't access Windows Update so I can't download it.

After doing some more poking around it appears that the root of my problems may be that Cryptographic Services aren't running. When I try to start them I get error 999 (error performing inpage operation). When I tried to install my XP Service Pack 2 CD it said that Cryptographic Services need to be running for the installation to proceed. So if I can get Cryptographic Services to run maybe everything will fall into place. As far as I can tell it's not a problem with the Remote Procedure Call service (Cryptographic Services is dependent on this).

Any ideas??

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That's a tough one.

Do you have a recent Restore Point to revert to? If not...

Do you have a copy of SP1? This is actually where I would start since it is relatively easy.

If a reload of SP1 did not fix it, I would be looking into determining which, and manually installing, the required Security Patches and hope one of the kick-starts Cyrptographic Services.