I have windows vista 64bit home premium. When I try to open up applications, close them, open something within everything freezes. I can use control alt delete but can only log off and log back in normally again until I open something and freezes, or reebot, shutdown what have you. I mean anything I try to open freezes. The start menu. I can get it to open but if I try to open a program from it, it freezes. I did a chkdsk run on my hard drive, it's good. Scanned for viruses and spyware that's good. I can not use system restore or open task manager to see if anything is wrong. I have opened the device manager but I don't seem to have any compatibility issues. Everything is up to date from widnows update. I am not sure what it is but I have a grey globe shape icon with grids on the icon on my bottom right bar. I can open firefox/IE and surf the web though..... Doesn't make sense. I am using an HP Pavilion DV7 Laptop with 4gb ram, onboard hd ati graphics. Anyone have a solution? Never encountered this before. Thanks.

Sounds like perhaps something has hooked CreateProcess or a shell extension has caused problems. I'd consider autoruns and shellexview to disable anything non-Microsoft from starting or running and reboot to see if it changes anything.

Cluberti,

Thanks. I did the diagnostic startup from msconfig and it worked fine. So I disabled alot of non microsoft services first to see if it could have been anything and it seems to be working fine now. The only thing that irritates me is I don't know exactly which service could have caused it...... Thanks though.

Well, one way to check it would be to re-enable everything, make sure the problem comes back, and then use the 50/50 routine. Disable 50% of the non-Microsoft items, reboot, and see if it occurs - if so, disable 50% of what's left, etc (if it doesn't, re-enable the disabled items and disable the other half and retry, etc). Rinse and repeat this method until you've narrowed it down (it's trial and error, but the 50/50 method is usually the quickest way to narrow things down).