Windows 7 pc freezing, getting worse

Hi everyone, I appreciate any help you can give me!

I'm running win 7 32bit Home Premium with service pack 1,

Recently I took my pc to be repaired, it couldn't boot windows. He identified that I had the Trojan Alureon, as well as a faulty power supply. He used Anvisoft to remove the virus, and formatted our harddrive & reinstalled windows 7 from the cd.

Unfortunately I think he knew less about computers than I do, as he somehow lost a whole lot of files when he ghosted my harddrive, he deleted a whole D: partition where I had pics of my kids, and goodness knows what's wrong with my computer now :-/

What's happening:

So my new problem is that the system keeps freezing. Any program I'm running will stop responding to the mouse and the top bar will say (not responding), and I can't open any other programs or files (though they will highlight when I mouse-over them). Ctrl-Shift-Esc won't open the task manager. When this happens, the blue indicator light which normally flickers as the computer is thinking just blinks slowly every second, and there's no quiet grinding/ticking noise that normally happens when it's processing stuff.

Sometimes if I wait it will recover itself after 5 to 10 mins, the light will suddenly flash madly and the grinding thinking sound will happen, and it'll wke up. Sometimes it won't and I have to power off manually by holding in the power button (cringe!).

I don't normally get any kind of error message.

When it's happening:

It started out once every few days, and now it's several times an hour. It can occur at any time, with any programs running or none. Once it happened with YouTube running and though the picture froze the sound continued (interesting?).

The worst times is when it happens during start-up. Frequently (now) it loads to the Accounts page, then I click a user and it gets stuck on the blue "welcome screen". No amount of waiting seems to fix it when it's stuck there. Sometimes it loads to the accounts page and then suddenly the monitor powers down. Pressing "sleep" and then the power button fixes this though.

Unfortunately I can't pin-point the exact time it started, or what programs I had added to the computer at that time... The first time or two it happened I thought it was just teething troubles with the new install...

When it doesn't happen:

So far in about 2 hours of Safe mode on 2 days it hasn't happened. I'm guessing this means it's either a software or driver problem, or it's the fact that Safe Mode is gentle on the system. One thing that does happen in Safe Mode is that my net connection drops out for around 30 seconds at a time every now and then. Not sure if that's relevant though.

What I've done so far:

I've run the following antivris/antimalware programs:
Avast
TDSKiller
Malwarebytes
MSE
Anvisoft (now uninstalled so I only have one antivirus in case it was conflicting)

All showed nothing.

For some reason I was also unable to access anything from downloads.microsoft so I couldn't update my drivers etc - managed to fix that by switching to OpenDNS, perhaps it was a problem with my provider? So now everything is up to date, no driver issues according to Device Manager.

I've checked the error logs in Event Viewer, I'm not a tech expert so I can't say what's important in there. For Applications, the only red warnings I've googled and they aren't important. There does seem to be a lot of "Information" notices that refer to delays, eg:

I don't know that that means, and my Google-fu isn't helping me today

In the System section of Event Viewer I'm getting stacks of errors, particularly 7001 (Service Control Manager), 10005 (DistributedCOM), 7026 (Service Control Manager). These errors relate to this morning's attempt to log in normally, it froze at the Welcome screen.

I have different errors during the times it freezes when I'm logged in. Mostly just Information notices about programs entering "stopped state", and a frequent reference to Microsoft Antimalware Real-time Protection encountering an error, and restarting a feature...

What I think I should do:

While writing this I've thought perhaps I should try stopping all my antivirus/malware except the windows firewall and see if that helps. Not sure how to stop them starting up when windows starts though - I'm currently in Safe Mode so would need to restart...

I could do a system restore to a point not long after windows was reinstalled, but I've just got everything back the way I like it!

I could look for and install the original drivers for my hardware rather than the ones from Microsoft update?

I haven't tried running checkdsk or clean boot, I've never done a clean boot before :-/

Id' really appreciate any help you guys can give me...

Cheers, Jess

 

Solved!

I found out how to do a clean boot and without Avast Firewall and Avast Antivirus running there have so far been absolutely no problems with my computer in the last 4 hours, yay!

I guess there is a conflict between Avast and Microsoft Security Essentials? I was running only Avast before the windows re-install...

Would anyone recommend either of them as being the best one to keep?