Whenever Windows starts a message appears advising: ‘ScannerFB - ScannerFB has encountered a problem and needs to close’ followed by the usual details of submitting an error report. This message is very annoying. Is there a way to prevent it from appearing? The computer is running Windows XP SP2.

The process ScannerFB has the full name ‘hpScannerFirstBoot’ and seems to be related to HP scanners. Unfortunately, there is little information on this particular process. However, from the description it seems that after you install a new scanner and restart the computer, this process is supposed to trigger something to happen (perhaps the installation of additional software for the scanner). In any case, at this stage it is likely your scanner is working correctly (as you haven’t mentioned anything to the contrary) so we should be able to safely stop this process from loading at startup, thus preventing the error message. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ‘msconfig’ (without the quotes). In the window that appears, click the ‘Startup’ tab. Look through the list of processes until you find ‘hpScannerFirstBoot’ or ’scannerfb.exe’. Once found, untick the entry for that item. Click OK, and then restart the computer. The error message should no longer appear.