Can't open most programs, IE shuts down after 2 seconds, Start Menu items don't work

I can't open a lot of programs on my computer.
I open IE and it shuts down for one second.
To get netscape to run I had to right click the icon and uncheck the box that says something about protecting the computer.
I try to access system restore and it just does nothing. I can get to control panel through the my computer desk top icon but if I click on it through the start menu nothing happens.

Computer seemed to be behaving fine yesterday.
Earlier in the day I hooked up a Dell 720 photo printer to my laptop. I couldn't find my install disk so I did a search for the driver. I couldn't get the download to work on the dell site. So I googled other sites for the driver. I'm not sure what site I ended up on but I thought I'd used it before and it was fine. I thought I was downloading the driver file but somehow ended up downloading zzip and no other files. I ended up on cnet to do a driver download but it just wouldn't work right.
I went through add/remove programs and used the uninnstall for zzip. That's when my above problems started.

At some point today I updated my free avast software. I can't recall when it happened in the above steps.

I went through all the steps in the read me that I could.

Malawarebytes wouldn't download from the provided link so I went to the link provided by malawarebytes site. When trying to install the program I got this error a few times "CoCreate Instance Failed; code 0x80040154. Class not registered. Then this error a few times "Runtime Error 372 Failed to load control 'WebBrowser' from ieframe.dll"

 

Re: Can't open most programs, IE shuts down after 2 seconds, Start Menu items don't w

Could it be something those programs don't detect? My home page has now been set to:

http://www.searchnu.com/421


Used to be google and I certainly didn't change it.