Can someone please tell me what the smurf this is?

If you could tell me how to access that, I can see if I can pull it up or not.

Uninstall/disable the Dell DataSafe Online thingy :p That seems to the crapware trying to do something, looking at the loaded assemblies :p

I'm not sure if that will harm anything else on my computer or not, though, since I don't know what it is.

crono's one of the techiest people around here. He's not gonna tell you to do something that could harm your computer. Though considering its name I would wager its some kinda wanna-be file protector or back-up or something. If you require the kind of service it offers, more than likely there's a better program out there for it than some standard Dell installation

Unless you explicitly paid extra for it when you bought your machine, it's some 1-year trial backup service to the internet for something like 2 GB of data. At least that's what it is on my laptop, which I will also be promptly removing as soon as it arrives, since I prefer doing my own backups without this extra tool running all the time using extra resources, and certainly not to some random location on the internet :p

But you can disable it rather than uninstall, if you feel you might make use of it in the future :p

Hmm, I'll have to try that. Thanks, man! Here's your prize.

oh yeah, sorry, i forgot to tell you that I didn't figure out exactly where in the event log it would be stored, because it's all organized differently in Win7 than what i'm used to :p.

anyway, the complete error log did indeed help with pinpointing the problem, it seems