I don't know what to do anymore

I'm at a loss here.

for the past month my computer has been getting progressively worse. it all started with my windows themes. When i would boot up it would be on windows 98 theme. after a while the windows 98 theme was locked and i couldn't change so i had to go into "services.msc" and actually turn it on there.

Then another problem; my audio wasn't working on boot up once again the service was not working so now both themes and audio weren't working on boot up. this wasn't much a problem at first just more of an inconvenience, until my microphone started doing some really weird stuff my when i voice-chatted in games it would record the audio from my games. Now the mic is even worse. even if i don't have any programs on for recording, anytime i speak into the mic (even while it is booting) i can hear the sound coming from my speakers.

also an old problem had come back recently that i fixed with the help of these forums where my processor would slowdown in game for about ten seconds going from 40-60 fps down to about 10 fps.

If anyone knows how to fix this without a format please enlighten me.

 

I always hate reinstalling, also.

The microphone issues sound like your advanced audio controls. You can access these from your Sounds and Audio Devices control panel (called Multimedia in Win98) by clicking volume buttons in record and playback sections of audio tab. You should get a row of sliders. There is a mute option for each kind of input/output. I often mute all the recording ones until I want to use them.

Is the themes issue fixed?

 

well im pretty sure ill just reinstall windows and not do a complete format