FFXI - POL problems and game crashingFollow

My game has been running fine for the past few months, but today after not playing it for about a week, I've discovered that something is horribly wrong with it.

Each time I open POL, it opening a Windows Installer window. It never goes any further than the little warning window saying "activating installation", but even when i click cancel, it will open another, until it happens about 5 times. Then, POL will be ok for the most part, until I try to actually play the game. When I try connecting to FFXI, another of those installation windows will pop up, and I'll close them. FFXI will open, but will behave extremely slowly, the music skipping around and playing very choppy. Usually it will crash within a few minutes.

And in case you need em, here are my computer specs:

Processor type/speed: AMD Athlon 2800+
Total Hard drive space/Free hard drive space: for the drive that holds FFXI, 8.32GB used/29.9GB free
Amount of Ram: 512MB RAM
Video card type: ASUS FX 5600
Operating system: Windows XP Professional



The game has worked flawlessly before. Only today does it start having problems. Any help would really be appreciated.

if narako's suggestion does't work then try reinstalling the program itself.
If that doesnt fix it, then try going back to a restore point in windows that is dated before you had the problem (if you're running WinXP or WinME (/me shivers at the idea of WinME))
If that doesn't fix it try reinstalling Windows Installer.
If that doesn't fix it, theres a command in WinXP that lets it scan itself for courpted system files, um i'm at work right now and running on 2hr of sleep, so i can't seem to remember what that is (something like SSF.EXE i can't remember :/ )
If that doesn't fix it, uh i ran out of ideas shoot your computer and claim victory.

THe solution is in the FAQ.