Computer Freeze...Help

[starriinites]

Good morning all,

So I am having a major issue and am really at a loss on this one. I have an Acer 5050 laptop running Vista. It came with 1gig of ram which I upgraded to 2.5 a couple weeks ago. I also downloaded IE8 shortly before upgrading RAM. Within a few days of upgrading RAM my pc started to freeze shortly after startup. Mouse will still move but I am unable to actually click on anything. Clock still functions etc...

I can run perfectly in Safe Mode for unlimited amount of time but as soon as I go out of safe mode and click on anything it freezes up on me and I have to hard boot. I cannot even access task manager when it freezes.

So I have started a number of troublshooting avenues such as downloading a reg scan from cnet. Also I have tried to unistall IE8 but while in safe mode my windows installer is disabled and I am unable to actually complete the unistall while not in safe mode. I have a feeling my registry is screwed up but am not entirely confident in my ability to go through the registry to fix.

As with most laptops, my Vista came preinstalled and like an idiot I never made backup cd's so I have nothing to work with in that sense. I did attempt a system restore to no avail. Oh, I also installed iTunes around the same time as IE8 and again, cannot unistall due to safe mode conflict. I tried to go and activate windows installer manually but it continues to reset to "stopped".

I am sure there is more information I can give but its about all I can think of at the moment. I know that prior to these issues coming up., I was showing some driver issues with my aTI card having too many drivers installed. other than that it was running failry smooth.

Any suggestions for further troublshooting would be greatly appreciated.

Trish

[mdk2k4]

What I would do in your case, is take the hard drive out, and put it as a slave in anotehr machine running vista, then do a scan for viruses, then do a temp folder clean up, then do a scanddisk to repair errors and then a defrag, then put it back on the laptop and see how it works, done it a lot of times, always worked. only thing to do all this gotta have an external drive case for that matter. good luck, let us know how it went.

[starriinites]

just an update on the problems.
i did scan the disk and also a defrag. ran countless virus scans as well as malware and spyware scans. finally i was able to reactiveate my windows installer in safe mode, rebooted without safe mode and unistalled IE8. i also uninstalled some other needless junk but i beleive ie8 was the culprit. for some reason my computer just does not like it at all.

so i guess the main issue was ie8 conflicting with my version of vista? not sure but it is fixed and just thought i would share the knowledge.

[mdk2k4]

Nice to hear you were able to fix it. You said you are running windows vista on 1 GB of ram, I don't see a problem to run ie8, but if you want to just make sure you have no viruses at all, and that any of your security programs are not detecting, try this, ComBofix, it will detect viruses and fix the OS like no other security program will detect or fix, it does wonders for me. First read averything carefully and follow instructions carefully, disable all your antiviruses and security programs that are running, then let it run and follow instructions, then after done you have to delete it (run-type-Combofix /uninstall-enter and done).
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/combofix/how-to-use-combofix
please let me know if it was of any help.