windows updates from 11/7/2012 cause lag and unresponsivness

Hello,
I have recently installed updates (Tuesday updates) from 11/7/12 which I think contained 7 critical and one optional that I installed, it finished installing and I turned my laptop off for the night and powered it up the next day to find it very laggy and extremely hard to open programs and when I do they come up with a not responding error (at which point I have to force the programs to close).

I then left it a day thinking it was just a spur of the moment and it comes to the 13th july and after seeing several videos online on my brothers laptop (same service pack, same OS, checked and he had the same updates installed but his is working fine) and find that I should do a system recovery from today (14/07/2012) and in my stupidity after checking for affected programs (just updates) I take it back to the 11/7/12. It then comes up with an error (I can't remember what the error message said) I click OK and it says it has completed its recovery to 11/07/2012

Now my question is, is this really to do with the updates I installed if so is it safe to do another recovery back a few days from the 11/07/2012 to earlier because I still get the some lag and unresponsiveness?

I then go onto control panel, system and security and I can't click on review your computers statues (I did this just to check if it had changed any settings) or most of the other links yet I can still open Firefox.

If it is not to do with the updates, then I am not sure what.

Please help!

I think I would just restore it to one restore date earlier than the restore point created for the Windows update, and then just reinstall all the updates again.

Hard to say whether or not the issue is related to the updates. I've updated about 10 different w7 PC's since the updates came out with no issue. But no two machines are identical, much less so if you consider the installed software on each one, all of which may contribute to any issue.

Even though there weren't that many updates this time around you might try installing them one at a time, starting with the critical ones and ending with any optionals you want. One other thing worth looking out for is making sure to install oldest to newest as new ones may depend on the older ones already being installed. You don't have to worry about that if your batch of updates were only the ones issued this last Patch Tuesday.