Hi;

If the user has been getting this error since early last year, I'm
surprised the support folks told him to ignore it.  It most likely means
a corruption of the user profile(s) and related policy settings in the
Registry.

It could also be because that workstation is tied to an NT 4.0 Server
with the default i386 Windows 2000 folder there, and the user
permissions don't get resolved correctly.  You may be able to correct
that by creating a local store for that i386 folder.

You might try creating a totally new user account on that system with
full Admin privileges, then logging in with that to see if the error
repeats there.  If it does, then not sure.  Perhaps using "SFC /Scannow"
would resolve the WFP problem.  (you will need to run SFC locally, not
from a networked station).
Probably a good idea to check
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;263499 first.
As a last resort you may need to do an in-place installation of Win2000
(see http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;292175 for
notes on that).

Lot of guesses in the above.  Unlike that other support person, I don't
recommend you just ignore this any longer. :)

You may also be able to find better information in the regular Windows
2000 support newsgroups here on the MS server.  This goes beyond the
scope of just Windows Update, so it would be wise to post your issue
there.  Perhaps starting in the "microsoft.public.win2000.security" or
"microsoft.public.win2000.general" newsgroups.