OK, but i'm still thinking that it has something to do with Group Policy, and if thats the case, then finding whatever option i changed and setting it back to what it used to be would seem like the solution. it just happened suddenly. As for an antivirus scanner, i would prefer to NOT have one installed. When i first bought this ASUS laptop back in january it had norton AV built in. i bogged me down and i didnt like it, plus i'm prejudiced against norton anyway. so i promptly purged every trace of it from the computer including every registry entry until i was sure it was gone. after that i tried avg and avast as well, and they were a little more performance friendly, but still slowed things down. so i removed them too. i just dont like the performance hit, among other problems that i've had with AVs in the past. I also dont have a firewall, even Windows Firewall is turned off. in my experience AVs and firewall have only hindered more than helped me, despite their benefits. and i do download lots of warez, ocassionally porn, etc. never really had alot of problems even despite that and lack of of what i will term "security software". As for system restore, its turned off because it takes disk space to store those images. to me disk space is precious. i do, however, perform a backup to an external HD once or twice a week. but i dont want to resort to that unless i have to because i dont feel like going thru the hassle of reinstalling programs that i had already installed post-backup/between backups, manually restoring settings, and having to recover various docs, etc. my laptop has 4 gigs of ram and a 230 gig hd and i've had it for only a yr now. its banged up and has lots of scratches, but those are only visual defects. plus the first ever keyboard button popped off last week but the button sensor still works. functionally, everything seems to be fine. i upgraded from vista to a student licensed version of win7 ultimate 64 bit in october and even though performance has increased slightly (compared to vista, at least), i can say that its decent but not all that great. still have had numerous BSODs and other mishaps since then, among other problems, but overall i'm happy with performance. i would like to squeeze all the life i can out of it before getting the next latest and greatest powerhouse laptop.
but i've gotten off track,and i'm still wondering if theres some other way to reset the GP configs back to their default settings. turning on system restore and making an image does no good at this point since the problem already exists.i have , however, noticed a LOT of processes running in task manager with names like 666.exe, 1.exe, 2.exe, etc., with no descriptions, so i killed off those processes, hunted down the files and deleted them, and did numerous restarts to ensure that they havent magically respawned. in any case, i dont see what that would have to do with Windows Update. WU clearly states that the problem lies with changes to the GP made by the admin. the only other thing i can think of is my friend charles screwing around with settings, since i let him borrow my laptop all the time. but he's not malicious and wouldnt do this kind of thing on purpose.
and i was able to resolve the other probs by editing GP again so i figure i can do this as well.
i just performed a SFC /scannow in command prompt, but that didnt solve the problem. it did, however, say that "Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files and successfully repaired them". this is no coincidence to me because i had just recently been screwing around with turning off Windows File Protection.
i also performed a chkdsk at boot-time, that found some problems and said they were repaired. and i even did a defrag. but the prob is still there.
whether i get this resolved or not, i'm thinking about backing up all my important files and program installers, and then reinstalling vista from the original factory disc,then doing a clean install of 7 from there, and then put all my progs/files back in after thats done. maybe it would help my general performance. i cant do a straight reinstall because the copy of 7 i bought is an upgrade only copy, which means that vista has to be preexistent on the HDD.
Well i appreciate any other help that can be provided. reply soon.