I  hope someone can help with this problem. My system is virus free (hopefully) and I clean the registry regularly. For some time now, I've had a problem. Two instances of rundll2 load at startup. When I forget to manually close them at shutdown, the system often hangs and sometimes gves a bluescreen when it is rebooted. I have scoured the net and found this isn't an uncommon problem but none of the suggested fixes worked. Is anyone familiar with this problem? Is there anyway that I can determine what causes these instances of rundll2 to start?

   My guess would be that it is either a corrupted rundll2 (isn't it rundll32?) file or a program using rundll2 is not using it properly.  It is unlikely that the file is corrupted so I would suggest trying to figure out what is using it.  It has to be a program running at startup.

Yes, it is rundll32, my bad; and it's the copy opened by Windows Explorer. All of the other apps that use rundll32 seem to be just fine and don't leave rundll32 running when they terminate. Would it make sense to replace rundll32 or Explorer? One odd aspect is that I don't even use Explorer directly but use VCOM's Powerdesk. I have installed the latest version of Powerdesk but the problem with Explorer remains. If it doesn't make sense to replace Explorer, what are the possible bad effects of somehow disabling it? (Is this even possible.)

My apologies for [osting again so quickly but I need to mention that the problem peristed after I uninstalled Powerdesk all together.

I doubt anything is wrong with Explorer or rundll32.  You could replace rundll32, just make sure you get the right version.  I think the only way you can replace Explorer is to reinstall Windows.  I don't think that disabling Explorer is possible.