Certain program appear briefly then disappear

Norton AV will do this, the Windows Task Manager (ctrl,alt,del), regedit.

Other programs will open however...IE, Spybot, etc.

Any ideas? This is strange.

OS is xp pro sp1

You have a worm/virus/trojan which closes security-related programs. Serflog.C I noted did that, but didnt close Spybot.