Fairly odd windows 7 activity

Hey guys, it's been a while since I've posted but Hexus has always helped out in the past...

so...

I run windows 7 64bit on my HP G61 laptop. It's run fine since I bought it in January. Unfortunately this afternoon some strange things have started to happen.
To start with it randomly turned itself off (or possibly went into sleep mode). I thought the battery was dead so I plugged in power and restarted. When it had rebooted itself fine, I went to open usual applications like Skype, Opera, iTunes and.....

...nothing. Nothing at all happened, they just wouldnt open. I tried other applications booting from the start menu and for most its exactly the same. The only programs that do want to open are 64bit Internet Explorer, Media Centre, Explorer, 64bit Photoshop, McAfee security centre.

Apart from that nothing else opens as far as I can see. I've googled most of the afternoon looking for solutions and it seems quite a few people have had this problem before but all the suggested solutions have so far failed.

I was hoping there was anyone who could offer some advice? I've backed everything up and done virus scans etc

Thanks A Lot! (As I said, its been a while since I've posted so if this is in the wrong place I'm sorry!)

Have you tried restoring to an earlier point?

Hey Blueball, thanks for the speedy reply!

I literally just completed a system restore to a point 6 days ago and no joy at all! So frustrating!
I don't know what more I can say really. When I boot up, I get a notification telling me that Windows Defender, McAfee and AdAware are deactivated, I can activate them eventually. Also, if I try and open a word file I get an error saying 'There was a problem sending the command to the program'

Something else I didn't mention in the original post is that the disk and its light seem to be working overtime at doing nothing very important at all....at the moment I have just IE open with 2 tabs and its working endlessly.

I appreciate any more ideas! thanks!

Run a malware scan? Malwarebytes would be a good place to start.

agree with snootyjim. It does sound a bit suspicious what is happening.

You could try checking resource manager to see if you can see what is causing the disk activity. Start Task manager, go to the performance tab and there is a button for resource monitor there.

Snootjim, I just downloaded the malwarebytes program. Executed the setup, but windows won't let me open the setup at all. I can't even isntall it.

Blueball, since I posted disk activity seems to have returned to normal, but I checked resource manager anyway. There isn't anything there that shouldn't be.

Another sketchy thing I've just come across is that now when I try and run a scan with McAfee it immediately stops and says 'An unexpected error occurred during your scan. Please click ok to go back to Home page, and then try running your scan again'. On top of this, now McAfee is refusing to turn real time scanning and auto-update on.

Is this a very strange virus I've got? I'm honestly thinking about just formatting and reinstalling windows, but I'm at Uni at the moment and I don't have the discs that came with the laptop (nor the serial number for windows). It would be quite expensive to go home and get them, so hopefully I can sort this out. (Manchester to Hampshire)

thanks again, i'll keep trying stuff.

Sounds like a virus to me, maybe a AV boot CD will help, http://www.techmixer.com/free-bootab...download-list/

I suspect it's a virus. I would try UBCD or one of the tools MaddAussie posted above.

What's the built-in sound chip?

The ASUS Xonar drivers (based on a chip and drivers from another manufacturer who escapes my memory) first released for Windows 7 stopped all 32-bit processes from doing anything - only 64-bit processes could properly initialise, which sounds very similar to what you've got.

Obviously your HP laptop isn't going to be named an ASUS one, but if you have a process named 'HsMgr.exe' in Task Manager try terminating it and seeing if that makes a difference.

Hey this is,

I've checked the running services and can't find anything like that. I came across some other threads on other forums with people with the problem you described and as far as I can see that isn't the problem.

I've tried booting into safe mode, exactly the same problem. Also, now the system doesn't start McAfee on start up and its totally disabled.
I'm gonna do a full reinstall tomorrow. I DEARLY hope that fixes it. Is it possible this could be some kind of hardware issue? Weirdly one of the only x86 programs that actually runs is winrar.

Thanks again all! please keep giving me suggestions if you think of anything more!
Pete

If you're prepared to do a full reinstall, that's by far the best option,

Do that, then if you're still having trouble we can re-evaulate and move on from there. Anything more at this point would just be conjecture and a waste of your time.

Have you tried Hitman Pro? http://www.surfright.nl/en/hitmanpro