Asterisk on (nearly) all processes?

When running PE v2.110 on WinXP Pro, I'm getting virtually all processes marked with an "*" in front of their names. Ocassionally, after I reboot the machine the list of processes with asterisks is more what I'd expect, but around 80% of the time it is almost all of them.

Obviously, in these circumstances, if I set PE to "hide Netstat sockets" I'm left with almost nothing to look at.

Like I say, if I reboot the machine, I have about a 1-in-4 chance of the display coming right and the "*" doesn't appear against processes which it did before.

Can anyone explain this frustrating behaviour?

I've installed a demo of PE on another system (also XP SP2) and it behaves normally in this case, so what have I got wrong on the troublesome one?

It runs WinXP Pro SP2 with all critical updates applied as of the date of this post.