Windows XP Pro w/SP2

Recently my system has been acting very strangely. At times when I click an icon to run a program the hour glass icon appears for awhile then disappears, the program does not open. Other times, the hour glass icon just stays on the screen. In both cases clicking on any icon does nothing. I can only shut down windows by turning of the machine. When I turn it back on sometimes everything appears to work but other times some of the programs that run at startup do not load. I have run Malwarebytes, Adaware, A-Squared free and NOD 32 to no advantage. Things run fine in safe mode. Hijack This log available if needed.

Any help would be appreciated

Jim

Hi Jim,

Firstly welcome to Mikes' Support Forums

had you recently installed a new program or a driver prior to the problems?

have you tried restoring to a time when things worked well? .... then carefully monitor updates coming in or other changes being made to see if you can pinpoint when the issue arises again.

It does sound like it could be a driver ..... in safe mode only minimal drivers are loaded and you say all works well ?

Do you have anything connected externally such as a flash drive, external drive ?

I am not sure if any of the others can read the HJ logs but for now could you take a look in task manager also and see if anything looks like its grabbing all the cpu;
To open task manager, right click on an empty area of the taskbar and choose task manager, select the processes tab from along the top of the task manager window.

As it appears to be running OK in Safe Mode, I'd be inclined to go into the System Configuration utility, ("Start > Run", type msconfig and click OK), select the "Startup" tab and disable everything in there. Then reboot and see if it runs properly (although with applications and drivers disabled, it may seem minimalistic like Safe Mode).

If it does run properly, re-enable items again one or two at a time until, by a process of elimination, you can identify the item causing the problem.