I encountered this error this morning when my SQL Server instance wouldn't start after I made some connection changes yesterday. I had to make the changes because a needed an ODBC connection, and that would only seem to work if I configured it to use named pipes.
After checking the logs, I received the error "SQL Server could not spawn FRunCM thread. Check the SQL Server error log and the Windows event logs for information about possible related problems.".
So, I went back to undo each change I had made, and noticed that the last change I made was to enable VIA as a protocol for my SQL Server instance. Disabled that, and hey presto, SQL Server now starts fine.
The strange thing is that enabling VIA in my SQL Express instance didn't seem to cause the same issue on that server though.
