Troubleshooters, Essentials, Update, Defender not working

Good People

- I've just made a clean install of Win7 Professional (to be clear - registered and 100% Genuine; MSDN AA/DreamSpark Premium program at my University).
- Few programs already installed (I could probably make a precise list)
- Drivers installed from the DVD attached to my Asus (but manually, due to ASSETUP.exe not supporting my OS)

The problem is that some Microsoft features/programs/whatever won't work. From my preliminary recognition these are:
- Troubleshooters - "an error occurred while troubleshooting: a problem is preventing the troubleshooter from starting" (no matter what I'm troubleshooting)
- Windows Essentials - won't install - I've tried only Photo Gallery and Movie Maker. The installation starts, but after a while it says that it can't be installed
- Windows Update - "Windows Update cannot currently check for updates, because service is not running. You may need to restart your computer" (but I've done that several times, I've also checked in Services - status says "Started" and restarting it doesn't help)
- Windows Defender - it won't start neither through Control Panel>Windows Defender nor through Services
- I've also find out, that my clock won't synchronize with time.windows.com (I've checked it about 10 times in 10 different moments and only once it synchronized succesfully, every other time it's "an error occurred..."

I thought it was ZoneAlarm's fault (list of blocked programs transferred from another computer) so I've uninstalled it and installed Comodo instead (firewall - Safe Mode; HIPS - disabled; Auto-sandbox - Untrusted; antivirus - Stateful). Nothing has changed.

Pleas help! I've been looking for answer for days and found nothing.

First of all, I'm not really an advanced user so please be patient. On the other hand I try hard to check on my own everything I don't understand before I ask too many dumb questions so I've established (correct me if I'm wrong) that Intel RST is kind of better, more recent version of Intel Matrix Storage Technology which I have installed on my notebook. Should I install the first one instead of it? Also I haven't played with hardware at all, so it is as Asus created it (no HDD changes).

As to the renaming command the outcome is: "A duplicate file name exists, or the file cannot be found." I checked, and I have both of these folders (SoftwareDistribution and SoftwareDistribution.old) in Windows directory.

By the way: probably all of my drivers are out of date - they were installed from DVD attached to my computer (which is, I believe, 3 or 4 years old).

Any further advice?

PS. I'm happy you liked my user name. :)

I'm not sure if I know what Ztrucker means. When I check in Date and Time > Internet Time it says that it has synchronized 2 minutes ago. But when I click on Change Settings and then Update now, it says that it wasn't able to do it.

Archer: yes, it's not my first reinstallation of Windows on this laptop.

As to the rest of the discussion - due to current lack of time I won't be able to take care of my laptop now. I'll come back here for a week or two. I hope you'll still be here.

I would start over and this time follow the steps to get a perfect Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7.

In particular this time pay attention to how drivers are handled in the first driver-complete OS, which is not like XP.

During installation delete all partitions, create and format New as desired, using the tools shown in steps 7 and 8 of Clean Install Windows 7