Games need opening twice to start, please help

I have a problem with a laptop I've been asked to fix. The laptop (Windows 7, 6GB RAM, 1.6 GHZ AMD Quad-Core A8-3520M APU) has no malware, and everything (hardware and software) seems fine, except that when you first try to open (load) a game, you have to do it twice or the game does not open. I.e.:



1. The laptop is turned on, boots, goes to the Windows desktop, everything is fine.

2. To start, say, Unreal Tournament 2004, I double click on the game's icon.

3. Nothing happens.

4. If I then double click on the icon again, then the game loads and plays as it should.


Experimentation shows that the first time you double click on the icon, two new processes appear in the Task Manager;

rundll32.exe *32
UT2004.exe *32

but the game does not load, nor do I get any error messages, until I again double click on the icon.



It does the same for other games, such as if I try to start Morrowind, then exactly the same thing occurs; nothing at all visibly happens, no error message, no system warning beep, and the game does not load. But if I look in Task Manager then two new processes have been added;

rundll32.exe *32
Morrowind Launcher.exe *32

and the game only loads if I then double click again on the icon.

It does this with many of the games on the machine, but even so, I uninstalled Unreal Tournament 2004 and installed my copy (original!), plus the patch and extra levels, and yet it still needs opening twice before it starts up though of course it works fine on my laptop and desktop.

When a game does load, then it works fine, and I can't find any other problems at all. But this is a new one, at least to me, and any help or advice would be appreciated.

Thanks for reading, and for any advice.