I've encountered this problem with firewalls that have not configured themselves to allow access to the Internet by this component. For example, when ZoneAlarm is set to allow it access, even if no logon via dial-up is active, the error seems to go away.

Why this process wants to go out on the Internet at boot time remains a mystery to me.

A cynic might guess it's checking to ensure that the Windows in use is still considered valid (just kidding of course).

I have exactly the same problem and I already asked for help on this forum but I didn get any. It seems that there are a lot of people having this problem. In fact I noticed that it all begun after installing latest updates (february) from Microsoft. I also noticed an error message occuring from time to time when windows is shutting down. It manages to shut down windows, but when I restart the computer next time, the Generic Host error from above occurs. I´ve heard that it might have something to do with the synchronization of the clock with internet time so I unchecked this option today to check whether that is the cause. I also scanned the whole computer for viruses and there were none. This problems really amuses me. Although I have ZoneAlarm installed, there have never been any problems with it and I have been using it for about 2 years.

I had this problem after I installed the MS update kb887742, removed it and have had any more ghp32 errors. Might work for you too.

Thank you Jimlball..located the update and deleted it. Will advise you of the outcome. Regards.

Hmm, I am unable to locate this update. I did as you said but I could not find it.

Well I found out that I never did installed this update, so I don´t think it is the cause for the problem. Any other suggestions?

By the way, I did installed a bunch of other updates on the 2/11 which are:

kb890047, kb885250, kb888302, kb873333, kb891781, kb888113, kb867282

Any chance that it is one of these that is causing the problem? Anyone having similar problem with these installed?

If you haven't installed kb887742 do so because it is supposed to fix the GHP32 problem in most windows xp systems.