I believe my fix was to use Sysinternals Process Explorer. I found an "access denied" error to a registry key. Cannot recall which key. I seem to...

I am getting the same, but the agent never starts. I've performed the following to get rid of agent xps to no avail:

http://www.sqlnewsgroups.net/group/microsoft.public.sqlserver.server/topic23407.aspx

exec sp_configure 'show advanced options',...