Protools crash on launch (no splash no nothing)

[Youngline]

Something very strange happened yesterday,

i went to start protools (6.1 LE Win XP) and before even the splash window
came up. I got the windows error window (you know when a program crashes it
asks you if you want to send a crash report to microsoft etc).

and this out of nowhere! I havent installed anything new that would conflict
with it... I have a 2.4ghz intel pentium 4 with 256mb ram (yeah i know it req
more but ive been using this for over a year no problem). i tried re-installing
and even updating to 6.1.1 nothing helped.

has anyone else had this kind of crash/problem? if so what is the cause? how
can we fix it?

thanks in advance.