Roxio gave strange error message on a brand new Dell w/ Vista factory install

This isn't at all what I'd expect from a factory install on a Dell machine but last night I was trying to setup my wife's new Dell Dimension 9200 desktop to surprise her before she got home.



Things seemed extremely slugging considering it's a Core 2 Duo w/ 2 GB of RAM, and all - slower than my Thinkpad T60 and it's only a Core Duo w/ 1GB.

Then I noticed it was just flat out locking up... I mean as close to 'hard locking' as I've seen from any PC in a while... I was trying to just do standard setup things and periodically nothing would respond to me clicking on it - even ctr-alt-del was fruitless... though the mouse was still responding to movement. I decided to wait it out and after about 60 seconds the screen went blank and then slowly everything came back up with some message about the security center having an unexpected error. I didn't write the error down because I was in a hurry, but it was EXTREMELY generic - maybe 5-6 words, no code, and 'ok' was my only option. It did this 2-3 times, once every couple of minutes, until windows update download some updates and asked me to restart. As soon as I restarted I guess maybe it was something in the windows update download but it popped up and said it had detected a serious issue with a driver that Roxio was using and the driver would have to be disabled for now. It had an option for more information on the error, which I clicked, it seemed to check some online help site, but came back saying no more info or solutions were available for this problem, but it would check periodically and let me know when a solution or more info was posted...??



Since then it hasn't locked up, though the performance has still been less than impressive IMO... but I'm wondering if the Roxio Suite will be functional with this driver disabled, and if anyone has any more info on symptoms and a possible solution for this problem.



Moreover I'm wondering if this is a known issue, how this problematic Roxio driver even made it into a factory install image on this Dell computer - I guess they just didn't test Vista out on their new systems before releasing it?