Unresponsiveness with explorer.exe

Hi everyone,

Last night, I encountered a problem where explorer.exe was being unresponsive. Just a few days ago, I started my laptop up as I usually would and it seemed to be working fine. When I clicked on the system tray, however, the icons were unresponsive. The wireless networks icon indicated that it was still searching for a network, when in fact I had a strong internet connection and could browse the net easily. What I also noticed when I looked at the System Tray was that Microsoft Security Essentials' real-time protection was turned off, and when I tried to turn it on, the window would freeze. When it finally unfroze, I checked the settings and it said that real-time protection was supposed to be turned on.

Really confused now, I started checking to see if everything else was working and so I tried opening Recycle Bin and My Computer and both times and a window popped up and said "The remote procedure call failed and did not execute" At the top of that window it said "explorer.exe"

I tried restarting my computer a few times, and it didn't solve the problem. Troubleshooting and diagnostics tests indicated that there were no problems either. So then I tried doing a system restore by going to Start>Accessories>System Tools>System Restore. When I clicked on it, however, nothing happened and I waited a bit and tried to do it again, except this time the start menu would open up and become unresponsive. I couldnt click on anything or type in the search bar, I could still close it though.

I then booted up my computer in Safe Mode, and everything loaded up fine. I then ran a quick scan through MSE which indicated no problems. So, I performed a system restore and it set my computer back to it's settings on 9/17/2013. Doing this would revert a My Dell update.

After the restore, everything was functional. Explorer was responsive, system tray was working, MSE was turned on, and the start menu wasn't bugging out. I thought that had fixed it, but when I turned on my laptop this morning the same problem happened, and I played around with it some more and ended up doing another system restore, to YESTERDAY'S restore point. No updates or programs were changed in that restore, yet doing so fixed everything. This happens every time I restart my computer or turn it off. I dont want to have to perform a system restore every time I boot my computer. Any suggestions?

Thank you all.

I'll try the full scan. When I performed the system file checker, it said there were no problems.

The MSE full scan came out with no results, and the quick scan using Malwarebytes came out with no results. I'm running the full scan now. I'm did all of this in safe mode because it wouldn't run when I tried to do it normally. That shouldn't be a problem should it?

I just finished running the full scan using Malwarebytes, and it didn't detect anything. I'm going to try doing a Clean Boot now, and then follow the troubleshooting link.

Since it doesn't seem like it's a problem with malware, could it possibly be a hardware issue?

So I'm not too sure what happened, but I did a clean boot, and it started working normally. I couldn't figure out what was service/program was causing the problem, but the problem went away... Thank you to everyone that gave suggestions!