Core 'explorer' process extremely slow

[jukfitz]

Haven't had any problems with this laptop in over a year. Came in this morning and it was locked up. Rebooted and it went to safe mode, things looked fine. Rebooted and laptop let me log in and seemed to be extremely slow, didn't finish bringing windows completely up.

rebooted with repair disc, this was successfull
used repair disk to check memory, no issues
next reboot, same slowness, didn't finish bringing up windows
updated security essentials, ran scan, found 5 trojans, cleaned them
rebooted, same slowness
updated malwarebytes, found quite a few 'bad files', cleaned them
rebooted, same slowness
updated windows updates (i think 4 new updates since last update)
rebooted, same slowness
rebooted in clean mode, no startup apps, no services, came up clean and fast
went through each windows service and app, found Windows Search was keeping laptop from finishing bringing windows up, causing slowness, disabled search
rebooted, now windows finishes starting, but extreme slowness with IE 9, and other explorer type apps (task manager, any security program, ...)

most recent - can reboot just fine, can't get IE 9 to work, it starts and goes to my home page (google), then takes 5-10 minutes between responses.

 

[jukfitz]

I'll add that the start menu, and anything i click on takes forever to do anything, cpu and memory stats from task mgr don't system is idle over 90% of the time with nothing taking over 100 meg of memory...

 

[jukfitz]

just ran resource monitor and looks like my HDD is belly up...

top 5 processes have response times of over 3,000...

 

[Windows i7 920]

Did you try running a virus scan? Maybe a fresh install of Windows?

 

[jukfitz]

Yeah, scan found a few things, fixed them, rebooted and no difference in performance. going to try to re-install windows next.