Random freezes, Performance Counter Strings, WmiApRpl, and DWORDs

Yes there are other threads like this. I've tried them. They didn't work.

I recently became the proud owner of a used HP Pavilion HDX9300, and am having sporadic freezing issues. It's got Windows 7 Pro x64 SP1, but shipped with Vista. I got the thing sans-HDD, so once I installed the hard drive I opted for 7 over Vista. Despite coming out 8 months before Windows 7, HP declined to provide drivers for anything other than Vista, saying that the system was "end-of-life" (After 8 months? Really?). Anyway, I've got mostly Vista x64 drivers on it, and they seem to work fine; those that didn't, like the biometrics, have since been updated by their parent companies, so everything ostensibly works.

I'm not sure when it became unstable, as my average uptime was very short due to the slew of updates I had to download, and the restarts required by some. Anyway, it will crash often on opening/closing a dialogue box (midway through the Aero zoom-and-fade animation, so that the window is still visible, just smaller than its actual size), and occasionally mid-scroll in Chrome (as you know, laptops tend to have a unique cursor when the scroll section is being used; this cursor stays during the freeze). Sometimes I will have a few seconds to move the mouse around, though the system does not respond to mouseovers/clicks/et al. When using Chrome, the "scrolling" cursor (mentioned above) stays as the main cursor for this limited interaction. Then it freezes completely, sometimes even blackscreening. No sound can be heard, though the drive activity light occasionally blinks. The only way out of this is a reset (push-and-hold, not sure what the exact term is).

Here's the fun part, so bear with me. I checked the event viewer, and found the following:

In addition to the customary "unexpected shutdown" notifications, there are three errors in particular that are present every time (XML will be posted later, if necessary):

These two at/during the crash:

Event ID 3012: The performance strings in the Performance registry value is corrupted when process Performance extension counter provider. The BaseIndex value from the Performance registry is the first DWORD in the Data section, LastCounter value is the second DWORD in the Data section, and LastHelp value is the third DWORD in the Data section.

Event ID 3011: Unloading the performance counter settings for service WmiApRpl (WmiApRpl) failed. The first DWORD in the Data section contains the error code.

This one occurs, as far as I can tell, as soon as the thing boots, but before I log in:

Event ID 1101: Audit events have been dropped by the transport. 0

Now, before you tell me to Admin CMD lodctr /r, I've already done that. Three times. The first time, it "completed successfully", then froze when I closed the window (right on the Aero effect, still/yet/ever). Second and third, it seemed fine, then crashed later with the same events reported (except for once; this was likely caused by my resetting it before it could record the event, as I've gotten the same events reported in later crashes).

Also, the thing runs some oldish games on max settings for several hours no problem, so it's likely not a temperature issue.

If you need XML of the events, hardware info, or anything else from the computer that's crashing, please ask. I'm not posting it right now because, while the thing is turned on and sitting next to me, it could crash if I tried to post this from there, and I'm NOT going to type out all that text by hand.

Lastly, I apologise for the TL; DR, but I didn't want to leave out anything important (except the XML and hardware specs, apparently... *sigh*).

Thanks.

Heh... Not sure how this made it into the "General Discussion" area... I'm sure I posted it in "Crashes".

Sorry.