I got exactly the same error lunchtime today on a PC I had completely wiped and was reinstalling. Only occcurred once Win XP SP2 was installed.
It cleared itself eventually, but only after I had installed the Sun Java stuff, and done a couple of reboots. Don't know if thats a red herring or not, but since M$ can't supply java anymore, even parts of the M$ update menu scripts don't work properly untill you work out you have to go to the third party source. That really clever - not
