Windows 7: Taskbar isn't transparent, and event log cannot be opened

Hey, hope everyone had a happy New Year.

I recently purchased an SSD, and installed windows on it (ultimate, 64-bit). However, now I notice two things.



1. The taskbar isn't transparent, although pretty much everything else is running aero
2. Every time I try switching the theme, it always changes the color scheme to windows classic
3. When I try to open Event Log, it says that "event log service is unavailable verify that the service is running"

I've tried running the aero troubleshooter, and it says it cannot determine the problem. I'm running a Radeon 6950, and 8GB of memory on a AMD Phenom II Thuban x6 at 3.9Ghz.

All of this worked on my original harddrive, however with this new installation I'm having all of those problems. Any idea on what I can do to fix this? I've already tried restarting the desktop manager service, I've tried new user accounts, and it happened before I installed SP1 as well. I could try uninstalling my video card driver, however I'm pretty sure that won't change it either. I'm hoping that I don't have to reinstall windows; however I'm not unwilling to do that.

Thanks for reading, hopefully you guys know what to do.

Sincerely,

~Brent