DMD Launches At Will

If this is the wrong forum, please feel free to move to appropriate area.

Purchased a Dell E1505 in early 2008. Was concerned about Vista stability at the time, so also purchased XP Pro and installed it next to the Vista installation.
13 months later, the hard drive crashes.

Had the laptop repair place replace the hard drive and install Vista back on using the Dell-supplied disks. 8-10 months later, we received a DMD splash screen error (I think it atlhdr missing) and couldn't get it to boot up at all. Took it back to laptop repair place and he got it running again (not sure how, need to call him next week). It was after this incident that we bought the external HD.
Now we started having that same DMD issue, atlhdr or partition missing, so I backed everything up, reinstalled Windows Vista and DMD. Spent a week loading updates up to SP2.
Now the laptop has been launching DMD at will, whether or not the computer is on battery or on cord, whether or not it is on and running windows or shutdown.
I've changed everything in the task scheduler so that it doesn't launch from shut down, made sure the BIOS settings don't cause a power up and went into msconfig and turned off the Cyberlink service.
We don't use DMD, but also hesitant of taking it off completely. Why is it launching completely on its own?

 

I'm sorry, DMD is Dell Media Direct (by Cyberlink). It is the media software that comes prepackaged with the laptop from Dell. It's my understanding that it is installed on a 'hidden' partition on the drive.