Well, now all of a sudden I am having issues. It was fine all day yesterday, all day today, until I went to go start up warhammer, and then it froze to hell. Ctrl alt delete did nothing. I restarted, issue persisted, I unplugged everything, and cleaned the computer out. I restarted, and then I sat at my background image on my computer, ctrl alt delete pulled up task manager, and explorer.exe was not running. So I forced it to run, and the computer locked up again. So now, I am in safe mode, typing this to you. Any suggestions? Also, yesterday AVG said a trojan popped up from somewhere, when browsing the internet, maybe that is it? No idea. I am running Malwarebytes anti malware atm, to see if that fixes aything, however I know a HJT log would be better, but being in safe mode it kind of gives a false positive off from what I have seen. If need be, I can wipe the computer and start over, however I don't want too, but I can. Maybe I will finally get around to getting rid of that vista partition I have on my computer, lol.
Anything change at all prior to this? AVG, isn't that the free one? I've always been a fan of paid Anti Virus. As for Malwarebytes, that's pretty good. It catches a decent amount of things that others don't. Can you disable your startup services to just those that are required and see if it boots to windows? At least that might help narrow things down.
Check your cpu and gpu temps. Sounds like to me a component could be overheating. Overheating does cause hard locks. On one of my older systems, I had a similar problem to what you are experiencing. I'd run a game and my system would freeze up. Turned out that my video card was over heating. I popped off the fan and heatsink from my card, cleaned out dust, reapplied thermal paste, and re-lubricated the ball bearing behind the fan. Problem was fixed after that. If it isn't overheating, try uninstalling your graphic driver and then install the latest driver. Download the driver first before uninstalling. Also, check your event viewer. XP and Vista have an event viewer in the computer management console.
Here is the thing. I have 2 partitions on my hard drive. A vista ultimate one, and an XP Pro one. Vista is working fine right now. XP has been acting up lately. If I leave the XP partition alone, then later it will work again. But now it is not doing it. AVG did pop a trojan up I do believe when all this started, but I healed it, and went on my business. Don't think I did anything other than that. All start up items are always disabled, I can run vent though and move folders perfectly fine in XP, but when I try to launch anything other than vent, or a folder, it will just sit there with an hour glass on it. So that is what is confusing me.
Update: I tried the XP partition again, and I tried opening a program, 3 in fact, task manager shows no cpu usage, sometimes 2% but I left it running all night, and those programs still did not open. So I am thinking it might be something corrupted or a trojan on the computer.
Well, looks like I was right, I went in on my vista partition and used Malwarebyes anti malware, and it popped up 2 trojans on the vista side, which I found interesting. Anyways, they were called serauth1.dll and serauth2.dll im guessing it to be a server authentication trojan, where someone would use my box for other things, and bog me down. So, I cleaned it, restarted into XP, and now everything is working fast and like a charm.