Desktop in Win 7 will not load

[nbthor]

Yesterday working away happily and all of a sudden Firefox wouldn't load websites and stuff started freezing. Rebooted and low and behold Trend Micro won't load and the computer freezes. Reboot again into Safe Mode and do a System Restore, reboot again and windows loads to login, which I do and up comes a black screen. Task Manager will start but freezes the instant I try to run anything. Explorer.exe shows as a running process. Safe Mode with networking works fine. Oddly, this exact same thing happened to both laptops in a hotel about 2 weeks ago, but resolved itself once we got home. One runs 32 bit and the other 64 bit Windows 7 home premium. We all have Trend Micro Internet Security. I suspect it is the trend micro and would love to uninstall it to see, but am completely unable to do this. I have downloaded Hijack this, but am not sure that in Safe Mode it really means anything. Also, both Laptops are experiencing this same problem which started within a few hours on all three computers.

I've tried the Trend Micro site with no results. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

 

[Broni]

Go Start>Run (Start Search in Vista), type in:
msconfig
Click OK (hit Enter in Vista).

Click on Startup tab.
Click Disable all
IMPORTANT! In case of laptop, make sure, you do NOT disable any keyboard, or touchpad entries.

Click Services tab.
Put checkmark in Hide all Microsoft services
Click Disable all.

Click OK.
Restart computer in Normal Mode.

NOTE. If you use different firewall, than Windows firewall, turn Windows firewall on, just for this test, since your regular firewall won't be running.
If you use Windows firewall, you're fine.

Same problem?

 

[nbthor]

Thanks for the help, but it turns out that the problem is with the Network Storage Device. Seems it hiccuped yesterday evening and all the network computers lost touch with it. I must have something configured wrong on all three computers, because the minute it lost touch, services/processes which deal with that drive all stumbled and stopped working properly. What totally threw me was that Trend Micro took forever to load and wouldn't launch the control panel. This morning I followed the directions to let the computer sit for some time and sure enough the icons came up on one laptop. I had a message that the a network drive was not reconnecting. I rebooted the drive and voila! All three computers are working again.

Now I need some advice on how to prevent this from happening again. A laptop that only works when connected to its home network is kinda pointless.