This morning my on board audio failed and I have managed to buy a new sound card to replace the failed on board one. However, I am also noticing that when I attempt to go into Disk Manager it is now giving me a "Failed to connect to RPC server" error message, and when defragging the hard disk it initially appears to start defragging but it never goes away from the gray box. I did deactivate some services recently, and have attempted to reactivate things to where they were without luck as of so far. Does anyone know what could cause this? I read on a Microsoft Knowledgebase article that it could be changing the computer name during the Windows "Out Of Box Experience", however, I have not changed the computer name and last time I even allowed OOBE to access the Internet was when I initially installed XP on this system in November 2006. (Using Windows XP SP2 with the HD Audio & Dual Core hotfixes)
Sounds like you disabled the wrong services, just do a repair install (same as doing a normal install but it asks at the last minute if you want to repair the existing install automatically)