Windows misbehaving (Explorer issues?)

[Flickerdart]

Yesterday my computer (Windows 8.1) started experiencing weird bugs that I think are connected:

Chrome (and seemingly only Chrome) takes about 5 minutes to start up.
OneDrive program doesn't work - it opens without icons and none of the buttons work. If I kill it and start it again, it loads for a while and then minimizes. Opening it again restores the broken state.
Opening some folders (one of my OneDrive folders, my Downloads folder, haven't tried others) is impossible - it says "this folder is empty" then does the loading green bar thing and then finally freezes.
Right-clicking on my C: drive icon does not bring up the context menu, but instead shows the spinning blue circle cursor - and then crashes.


Any ideas on how to solve this?

[Amridell]

Have you run a malware scan? Considering that your symptoms are standard for a slower computer, but it's obviously sort of new as it runs 8.1, my first guess would be malware, as it's not unheard of for them to co-opt the explorer.

My next guess would be that something got messed up in the system files.

[Flickerdart]

So...good ol' restart fixed it. I forgot that in 8, shut down isn't the same as restart, so when it was still messing up today I thought that it wasn't solvable that way. But then I rebooted it on a whim and it's back to working.

[Amridell]

Yeah 8 is sort of frustrating like that isn't it? The hanging problems are sort of annoying.

Glad it got fixed though!