Laptop freezing every time I confirm/cancel something that is a pop-up

Every single time I get a pop-up (including a pop-up about allowing a trusted program like Malwarebytes) to run after it is confirmed my laptop just freezes... no amount of waiting fixes it.

I am using Avast free and PrivateFirewall 7.0, neither of which have said anything since this started happening.

So my assumption is that it is not a virus but most of the time I can't even run them as the prompt to allow admin settings freezes the laptop completely. It seems to be ONLY when there's a pop-up, otherwise it's fine.

I'd change to the Win7 Firewall and Microsoft Security Essentials to see if it helps. We do see issues with Avast and 3rd party firewalls are trouble and not normally needed since Win7 firewall is perfected.