sudden theme change and disabled functions home premium 64 bit

i hope this is the right spot for this question, apologies if not and also in advance for stupid questions - my knowledge is pretty basic and patchy.

sorry hit return key by mistake :/
i am running windows home premium on samsung r580 laptop. the theme suddenly changed and disabled a lot of things such as internet and sound. tried to run system restore error message said it was not working and something about an error in the shadow copy. i googled what had happened and found someone on a windows vista forum who eventually solved similar problem by installing windows 7. i tried some of the other things suggested to look for the fault. the event viewer had error message 'event log service is unavailable, verify that the service is running', msconfig something similar

i have a recovery environment disc from the original install, it's going round but not loading anything. there may be an unrelated problem with the drive as it was making a noise last time i used it. i tried a usb stick to see if that was working but it didn't seem to be (usually has flashing lights)
any ideas or advice really appreciated.
thanks