AuditMode: explorer.exe remote procedure call failed & did not execute

I've been customising the default user profile in Audit Mode ready to sysprep a clean install of Win7 Pro x64 on a 250GB SSD (C: ) and a 1TB HDD (D: ) using Kari's guide. However, I've run into some apparently unrelated problems.

1. First of all, Macrium was hanging during installation. It did not move for about 20-30minutes, and in Task Manager it appeared that none of the Macrium related processes seemed to be doing anything. I ended the task. It appeared to install successfully, however, despite my having apparently end tasked it before completion. A few minutes after ending the task the box popped up to 'finish' installation, and I was able to open Macrium and everything looked like it was installed successfully. So I ignored this for now

2. I right clicked on desktop and went to 'personalise' and changed the background to one of the preset groups. I clicked on the leftmost of the four boxes at the bottom which said 'slide show' (I was curious what it was), and the window that it opened got stuck on 'loading'. I ended task and windows restarted explorer and checked for solutions of which it found none. After this, whenever I try to open control panel and get "::{26EE0668-A00A-44D7-9371-BEB064C98683} The remote procedure call failed and did not execute", I click 'okay' and then the next box says "explorer.exe" instead of the long number string, and also has the same error message. Clicking on Computer gives me just the 'explorer.exe' box with the remote procedure error, clicking on Action Centre/other explorer things give me the same string of numbers as the first box, followed by "\1" and another similarly long string, and then the explorer version of the remote procedure error message. Eventually, after quite a while (half hour, maybe more) explorer seemed to reset or something and computer, control panel, etc. were accessible again.

3. I tried to open MSE to run a scan but it would not open or open any processes when I clicked on it. I ran sfc/scannow and that didn't flag any problems. Malwarebytes shows up clean (I've barely used internet except to install the aforementioned programs and read up 'more info' of various windows updates). Fearing a conflict, I've uninstalled MSE, malwarebytes and macrium (since it was the first thing to cause a problem).


4. I repeated my actions from 2. to see if the problem persists without these three programs installed. Even without these programs, I managed to replicate the previous explorer.exe crash. I had the remote procedure call errors for about an hour or so, until the background eventually decided to change to the next one in the set which seemed to indicate a reset of explorer. Computer/Control Panel, etc. are now accessible.

There are a few things going wrong here, and I'm not sure how they're related, if at all. I'm not sure whether the problem is necessarily related to audit mode, however it is the mode I was in when the problems occurred and didn't know where else to post this. I've done quite a bit of searching online and solutions suggest perhaps it's an issue involving a corrupted user profile, and that it's fixed by creating a new user profile. However, since I'm in Audit Mode I'm using the built-in admin profile therefore I don't know if that solution still applies. I don't want to sysprep and make an image of a corrupted profile, and I fear another clean install as windows update took hours Does anyone have any ideas as to what could be happening here?