Puzzled, puzzled, puzzled

I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop. It ran well for 9-10 months. I had a problem w/ the led/backlit screen and sent it in for repair. Since it has come back it has had it's quirks. One of which is the built in wifi. Prior to "repair" my wifi was excellent, no doubt during so said "repair" the antenna or it's connection were disturbed.

The latest and greatest was after shut down yesterday. Upon restart, later in the evening, the laptop totally froze. My only choice was to do a hard shutdown. Since then the computer is completely wrong!

1) After second hard start I entered safe mode. I tried a system restore from here only to find the system restore points no longer existed.

2) I was able to re-enter windows but everything was in super slow mo mode. After a few seconds a pop up said desktop gadgets failed to start, it ran a re-start and failed, stating it would inform me when a resolution was found. With that a few minutes later all the desktop gadgets disappeared. I tried running disk defrag but I couldn't get in to it, it just never opened (20-30 min wait).

3) Norton at this point was popping up with problems of its own. Taking roughly 35 min. I was able to work my way into Norton, and un-install it. I was able to restart and reinstalled Norton. Both of these functions took over 1-1/2hrs.

I am now at a point where the computer takes 8 - 10 min. preforming ANY action.Even as simple as clicking on the trash bin.

Well I was able to run both but only in safe mode. Only found one issue in both cases. I now only can get into s mo. When I try to enter Win It takes 40 min+ just to see the desktop. From here All I get is things like Windows explorer is not working do you want to stop it. Skype is not working shut it dawn..... A regular shut down doesn't even work.

I backed up my computer to an external hdd. When I try a system restore it doesn't give me the option to restore through Norton.

cluberti said:

My brother's Toshiba laptop had these same exact symptoms yesterday, and online virus scans didn't find anything. However, autoruns caught some long unknown named .exe running from the registry on startup from Safe Mode w/Networking (not Safe Mode, surprisingly) and after copying the file off and uploading it to virustotal, we removed it and then scanned his box offline. It came back clean, and when he got back into Windows all was well. Virustotal didn't find anything wrong with the file on any engine, but I put it back onto a test VM and the VM started acting up, so I'm pretty sure whatever this thing might be, it certainly is malicious. Waiting on virus vendors to figure it out .

What is it called?