uploading an inventory CSV causes service to fail

we have a problem where when we upload a IT inventory CSV it crashes the service so severely we have to restart the server - this is problematic the server has other duties

in an effort to continue things along we tried to uninstalled v7 but it says there's an Installshield ikernel.exe can't find which stops the reinstall - I am at this point unwilling to manual start removing entries in the registry to get this working... i believe this is a very generic error message

so therefore we are in a fix... we cannot go forward, not can we go back

server is not a powerful machine... only a 2000 server running on a 384Mb and a dual P3 I believe