I am the computer guy of the family and also run a PC repair business however I have run across an interesting problem on my own PC. No doubt due to the amount of programs I test and such.
However I have been unable to fix it no matter what I do.
Here is what happens as best as I can describe it:
Right click on MOST applications will stop functioning, right click on any explorer windows or taskbar does nothing.
Applications wont launch- Nothing happens, no noise, errors, or anything. They dont even show up in the task or process list.
Start menu (sometimes) mostly disappears. Only the top links whatever they are called remain (shutdown, programs, documents, control panel are all gone)
Generally I cant launch taskmanager to restart explorer.exe.
Clicking on certain objects generates only a system beep type noise and nothing else. Whatever I click on fails to do what it should do.
I havent been able to find any consistent messages in event viewer that seem to relate to the times I have these problems.
Basically I am unable to run any programs, use most programs that are running, or do much of anything.
Ctrl-alt-del responds perfect, but wont launch task manager. This is also my only way to restart.
Rebooting also sometimes fails, or takes forever.
-Now what I have done so far is:
Virus scan with several programs
Spyware scan with all the common programs
Hijack this log analyzer online
I have also gone through tasks manually and through autoruns to get rid of anything that seemed odd, or that I didnt need.
I have run scandisk
And run through a few registry programs.
None of these seems to fix the problem. It seems to start happening at random times with no regard to software I have running. Sometimes it happens a few hours after bootup, sometimes a few days.
I would really appreciate any guidance on where to go from here. I dont know what else to try short of a reinstall (which I would like to avoid). I try to learn from these experiences and a reinstall doesnt teach much
I am running an AMD64 dual core processor. 2 gigs of ram. WinXP sp2 with the majority of updates.
If I forgot to mention anything let me know! I appreciate everyones help
Justin