First I tried turning it off... and a few mins later booting it up again. The same problem appeared almost straight away.
Next I tried a spyware check and a virus check with spybot search and destroy and avast respectively. This showed up nothing.
Next I tried looking for malicious system processes but could not find any.
I then tried seeing if anything new had installed... nothing new at all- last new program installed on the computer was in April...
Here is a screenshot of the problem.