I did what you said and noticed nothing strange about the vcddaemon process. I end processed it and opened the vcdprefs.exe or whatever and it reopened vcddaemon for me but no changes were observed. One thing that is different ... the initial instance of vcddaemon is running with /s commandline parameter. The one that appears after end processing vcddaemon and opening vcdprefs does not have /s as a cmdline parameter.