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Windows starts very slowly, when it starts
I was trying to remove Windows Defender this morning as I'm running MS Security Essentials. I thought the two programs might be conflicting with each other. MsMpEng.exe was using over 260K of physical RAM which I thought was excessive. At one point I suspended the MsMpEng.exe process while in Resource Monitor. My system immediately crashed. After rebooting, I discovered that I couldn't start Windows (7) again.
Thinking that I damaged one or more critical system files when I suspended MsMpEng.exe, I booted to Safe Mode with networking and restored Windows using a system restore point from yesterday. I was able to log into my user account after the system restored. Everything worked fine. However, my relief was short-lived: I wasn't able to log in again to my user account after re-booting without waiting fifteen minutes or longer. There are no earlier restore points I can use. Starting with the last known good configuration didn't work. I tried rebooting and running Startup repair. That didn't work either. The message it gave was that my problem booting was probably due to a change in configuration.
Shortly before the crash I ran Malware Anti-Malware Bytes and AdwCleaner. All instances of malware and adware were removed. After the crash I ran MS Security Essentials. No viruses were found.
Please advise if I need to upload a system configuration file, and if so, what program I can use to capture it to a file. I haven't done this for a while since before today, my system has been running smoothly, so please bear with me. I'd much appreciate any help. I'll do a repair installation but only if absolutely necessary. I'm typing this from within Windows in Normal mode.
Last edited by accordeoniste; 26 Dec 2015 at 22:47. Reason: grammar correction and additional details