calling all techies

[purple gelatinous cube o' Doom]

Ok, here's the scoop. I was just doing normal surfing stuff online, and things stopped responding, as happens from time to time when my internet (Comcast sucks), gets bogged down with lots of users. Anywho, I ended task on firefox, and a game I was just about to run. After the freeze, the only things that will pop up are firefox (but not IE), Microsoft office, and various other programs. But, most of the games I've downloaded from MSN and the like won't pop up, nor will, my documents, my computer, control panel folders, or help and support. So, basically anything that would be of value to try and fix this won't work. I would like to go back to a restore point, but can't currently do that either. I have an inkling that it's a hard drive issue, but really am not sure. Oh, the computer in question is a laptop with XP on it. Anyone who's in the know about this stuff, have any suggestions of what I could do, or give me a hint to what the problem is. I'd rather not take it in and pay for anything if I don't have to as I've just put $350 into my car for repairs, and have several other large expenses coming up.

[Krrth]

I assume you tried rebooting? I not, try that and see what happens. I you did....try running a scan to see if you have bad sectors.

[purple gelatinous cube o' Doom]

yeah, I rebooted multiple times, and it sat off overnight. I've even tried going into safe mode, and no dice. System restore now switches back and forth between popping up not responding right off the bat, and telling me that it is unable protect my computer, and I need to restart, but that doesn't seem to do anything to help. Haven't run the disk defragmenter yet, but I do know the none of my drives need to be degfraged.

[Krrth]

How old is the computer? The older the drive, the greater the chance of failing. I would recommend getting an anti-virus that will do a pre-boot check and run that. You shuld be able to find one online easy enough. I sure some of the others here can recommend something specific.

[purple gelatinous cube o' Doom]

the computer is about 14 months old. I also have an anti-virus(Norton), but it also will not work at the moment.

[InksGuy]

Yeah, I agree with everything Krrth's said.

It does sound like it could be some sort of data corruption thing. Try running chkdisk using the Run command (Start menu, or the Windows Key + R if that's not working.) Or if you have a DOS mode boot floppy (antiquated, I know, and you'd need a USB floppy drive for a laptop), it should be on there. Some kind of vital system file or dll might have been hit- I've had problems with stuff not running from a corrupt dll, but I just did a wipe and reinstall of windows.

Other than that, the other obvious pointer would be some sort of virus infection. You say Norton's not working, though... hmm. Personally I use AVG 8 (Free), but that's not going to be much use to you if nothing runs. And if you can't scan there's not much you can do to kill it...

Try killing unnecessary processes in task manager, if you can get it open. Or anything using 99% of CPU power in the processes list.

Additionally, Avast 4 (http://www.avast.com/) will do a boot-time virus scan. There's a free version too.

[Krrth]

On the whole Norton issue: I can tell you what we I learned. Both Norton and Mcaffee are the "Top" anti-virus. This does not mean that they are the best. It does mean that they are the ones that virus creators will try to get viruses unnoticed by. Try third party, such as Avast!, Spy-Bot:S&D, or AVG.

[purple gelatinous cube o' Doom]

The computer did a chkdsk on startup last night shortly after it all went south and fixed some things, so that aspect is already been dealt with. installing another anti-virus program will likely mess with Norton (adding another A.V. program has really screwed up my current one before), so doing that is definitely not an option as I've payed quite a bit of money for Norton. That, and somehow with what I've seeing, affecting certain programs/folders and not others in seemingly random (but likely isn't) way leads me to believe it's not a virus. Somehow I just don't think a virus isn't going to attack something such as IE without attacking Firefox. Seeing as the issue affects the ability to use system restore, I think it's leaning towards a hardware problem. Although I hope it isn't, since that would mean replacing the hard drive.