plug and play service causing .cpl programs to close after 8 secon

On a Windows XP sp 2 with all updates installed to date. Any control panel
program will close 8 seconds after you open it (desk.cpl, timedat.cpl,
access.cpl, etc) when the plug and play service is running. If I disable the
service, then the control panel programs run fine. I went through all the
services and startup programs on the computer, disabling each in turn and
plug and play is the only one that causes the problem. I have already
replaced services.exe with an earlier version, and with a version that is
from a machine that is not encountering the problem with no success.

Has anyone else ever seen this?