It seems that there are few of us suffering from this, but indeed there's no solution yet.
I've raised an issue about this to
Sony e-support, they have been responding to me but their suggestion basicly is to do a full reinstall of Vista. I am not willing to do this, because I really think there needs to be other kinds of solutions for issues like this than always just reinstall.
Now, lately I have found out that I cannot start Vaio HDD protection application either. It seems to be running in the background, since sometimes when bumping the laptop I see notification of HDD protection beeing activated. But I cannot open the configuration utility at all.