Slow PC, struggling to launch programs

Sometimes issues like this are malware related! More recently (at least in this forum) the majority of slow downs are due to what a user is running.

You can take two courses of action.

1. work on improving PC performance. See:Basic computer maintenance everyone should do
2. If you want find out if you have malware problems, the below steps will help you do that.

Please follow our standard cleaning procedures which are necessary for us to provide you support. Also there are steps included for installing, renaming, running, and posting HijackThis logs as attachments.

• Run ALL the steps in this Sticky thread READ & RUN ME FIRST Before Asking for Support
• Make sure you check version numbers and get all updates.
• Very Important: Make sure you tell us the results from running the tutorial...was anything found? Were you unable to complete any of the scans?...Were you unable to download any of the tools?...Did you do the on-line scans as suggested? etc.

• After doing ALL of the above you still have a problem make sure you have booted to normal mode and run the steps in the below link to properly use HijackThis and attach a log:

Downloading, Installing, and Running HijackThis​

Make sure you also rename HijackThis.exe as suggested in the procedures. Use analyse.exe for the new name. This is very important due to some new infections going around.​

• When you return to make your next post, make sure you attach the following logs and that you have run these scans in the following order too:
  • CounterSpy - only for Windows XP, 2K, & NT users
  • AVG Antispyware log - ONLY IF NEEDED you were not able to run CounterSpy. - only for Windows XP, 2K, & NT users
  • Bitdefender - from step 6
  • Panda Scan - from step 6
  • runkeys.txt - the log from GetRunKey.bat
  • newfiles.txt - the log from ShowNew.bat
  • HijackThis

NOTE: You can only attach 3 files in a single message so it will require that you use two messages to attach all of these logs!