When the computer starts for the day, the following message always appears: ‘Media Consumer. The Engine is not running!’. I am not aware of any program on my computer called Media Consumer, so I do not know to what the message is referring. The computer is running Windows XP.

This is quite a unique error message, as I have been unable to find any reference to this message when researching your question. In any case, stopping this message from appearing on startup may be solved by disabling the process (which causes this message to appear) from loading on startup. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ‘msconfig’ (without the quotes) and click OK. In the window that appears, click the ‘Startup’ tab. Look through the list of items which load on startup, for the one relating to this message (e.g. it may be called ‘Media Consumer’ or like) and untick the entry. Click OK, then restart the computer. The message should no longer appear.

That said, since I cannot identify exactly what causes the error message, this makes me think the message could be related to some spyware, adware, or a virus. Therefore, I also suggest you do a complete scan of your computer with a virus scanner and antispyware utilities (e.g. Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition, Spybot Search & Destroy, and/or Windows AntiSpyware).