Back in early July (around the 9th) we ran Spybot - Search and Destroy on our Dimension 4550.  Since then we've been getting this error message shortly after computer startup.

NotifyAlert.exe - Common Language Runtime Debugging Services

Application has generated an exception that could not be handled.

Process id=0x3d8 (984), Thread id=0x408 (1032).

Click OK to terminate the application.

Click CANCEL to debug the application.

After reading several other postings on the Dell Forum this morning (8/11) we decided to try uninstalling Dell Support from the computer, which has made the message stop displaying after login.  Yeah!

I can only assume therefore that Spybot found something in the Dell Support files that it considers spyware and removed it for us, so that whatever Dell Support is trying to start on login no longer works correctly.  I'm not sure that the Dell Support program is important to the day to day operation of the computer for us so this works (though if Dell knows what file(s) was lost I'd be just as happy to copy it to the computer and turn Dell Support back on).

Anyway thought others might want to know that if you run spyware removal utilities (such as Spybot) and have Dell Support on your computer you might get similar error messages, and the easiest solution seems to be removing Dell Support.