I know my computer has a lot of problems...
This computer's got a history of Vundos and trojans. I can never be sure that I've gotten rid of them all. I have Symantec Antivirus Enterprise and Spyware Doctor, did a scan on both recently and nothing worth noting turned up (other than tracking cookies, blah blah). So here's the symptom description:
If I boot into normal mode, it literally takes some 5-10 minutes for my desktop + taskbar to come up. Normally this comes up in 5-10 seconds. What I can do though, is to open up Task Manager and use Run... to run my programs, e.g. Firefox. After 5-10min the desktop/taskbar comes up, but explorer freezes once every 10 seconds or so. Maybe "freeze" isn't the right word. Explorer "unfreezes" once every minute or so for 10 seconds, then freezes again for a minute. During the freeze it won't even update anything on the taskbar. All the programs are unresponsive for the first 5 seconds I alt-tab into it, but after that it works like normal.
Eventvwr has the following log once every minute or so:
The server {8BC3F05E-D86B-11D0-A075-00C04FB68820} did not register with DCOM within the required timeout.
I looked at some online advice and this seems like WMI is down (I've seen messages of "WMI needs to shutdown" or whatever for a week or two now, but the issue described in this thread as well as this eventvwr entry only happened today), and one solution was to go into dcomcnfg and do some fidgeting there. Anyway, I go to dcomcnfg, open up Component Services, open up Computers, and bam dcomcnfg dies and with the following entry in eventvwr:
The run-time environment has detected an inconsistency in its internal state. This indicates a potential instability in the process that could be caused by the custom components running in the COM+ application, the components they make use of, or other factors. Error in f:\xpsp3\com\com1x\src\comsvcs\package\cpackage.cpp(1184), hr = 8000ffff: InitEventCollector failed
I'm not sure if this is some virus or just my computer being messed up.
The day before this happened I gave myself full access to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. May seem stupid, but I read somewhere that this is a fix for MSI not working properly sometimes and I didn't know better at the time. Maybe this is related.
Thanks for the help
