Skype, Internet Explorer, µtorrent no longer responding after restart

Hi everyone,

Running Windows 7 Pro 64

Having some trouble for a couple of days, have tried a few things to sort it which I'll outline here.

The problem: Internet Explorer, Skype, Firefox flash plugin and µtorrent (only noticed these applications so far) have stopped working or respond extremely slowly.

This started when I rebooted my machine to apply updates on Friday, it hung on shutdown so I manually rebooted. Everything seemed to be okay but I've noticed the above applications responding extremely slowly (taking five minutes to open) or hanging on startup. Not sure what they all have in common or if this is even the same problem. Other applications i.e. Chrome open instantly and work fine as usual.

Last week I had a toolbar by the name of "mixidj" installed by a file splitting program without my permission which changed my homepages to its own search engine, though I believe that has been removed thought it would be worth mentioning.

What I've tried so far:

• Rebooting.
• Malware scan - nothing found.
• Checked disk for errors - nothing found.
• Reinstalled flash plugin.
• Reinstalled Java - installer opened extremely slowly, not sure if this is normal.
• Skype crash report indicated jscript.dll to be involved so I tried to remove and replace it, however I can't gain access to delete it in Windows no matter what I do, tried using the latest Ubuntu livecd to delete it that way but the LiveCD does not recognise my RAID 1 array to view the directory.
• Checked Event Viewer to see if there were any errors, saw Windows repeatedly trying to delete a file called V01tmp.log from within \AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WebCache but unable to delete it giving the reason '"Access is denied. ". The delete file operation will fail'

Thanks for looking!

 

I would do this but all of my available restore points are after the problems started. I'd really rather not reinstall Windows but I have no idea what else to try right now.

 

Hi plodr,

I tried this and it didn't fix the problem. I went ahead and restored from a backup image I made a few months ago which I thought was going to much more painful than it was, everything is up and running smoothly now. I installed all the updates I had installed previously and there's nothing wrong so it wasn't the windows update that caused it, the cause will remain a mystery.

Thanks for your help though!