Well I think it is - installed the full client for a Vodafone E272 USB modem and it appears to have caused a problem with Windows XP.
A client/server application was unable to spawn its server process when the client started up and would give a WinSock 10038 error.
Removing both the full and lite versions of the software appear to have fixed it, I'll try re-installing them at some point, but for now it seems the removal of these installs have me running again.
Edit 19:30 12/02/08 Installed the VMC suite a second time and guess what the application and Winsock error starts again. Uninstall it and it goes away.