Explore Freeze, then logout hangs. Win 7 64

Seems that certain actions will cause windows explorer to hang, sometimes its a NAS (mapped drive), sometimes other things. Also IE will sometimes hang. If I download a file, and then try and run the file from the IE "RUN" button, the window says verifying, but never comes out of that. I can only run from windows explorer, but that doesnt always work until a reboot.

After any of the above, when I try and reboot or shutdown, I get the "Logging Off" message and the system hangs, and I am forced to Hard stop the computer.

Only thing I can find in event viewer is some Event 1002, task 101 errors for iexplore.exe, followed buy a warning that winlogon notification subscriber <Sens> is taking long time to handle the notification event (logoff) - event 6005 and then warning (event 4627) "The COM+ event system timed out attempting to fire the logoff method on event class.......subscriber explorer HRESULT 80010002

This was a clean install of win7 x64 to some older hardware, not running any games or anything. I thought it might be hardware, but I am getting the same situation on another win7 x64 clean install.

Its getting to be annoying to be hard stopping and rebooting all the time. Any help would be appreciated.

Hey.

Completely uninstall any antivirus or firewall apps and that should fix it.

no firewall on either computer, avast free on 1 computer, the other has no virus protection yet. I can give it a try, but are you saying that windows 7 won't run correctly with virus protection running?

uninstalled avast, same issue. the verifying hangs after hitting the run after downloading via IE8 Funny, I ran the beta for months, never had these issues.