my 2¢ worth
I share an interest with ‘familyman14’ in watching this thread. ‘jobeard’ has been keeping pace with ‘sputnik’ as new symptoms are discussed. Early on ‘pdyckman’ threw in a few pointers. However, I cannot resist the urge to contribute my 2¢ worth.
It has been established that the computer is running slower. Ccleaner & emusing cleaned the Windows registry. I have not seen details that confirm malware/virus threats are not present, and browser helper objects and startup programs are not bogging down the machine. Some programs are not compatible: Spybot S&D and Norton Internet Security, or two AV programs fighting each other, as examples.
From a hardware perspective, surviving the defrag operation demonstrates the health of the HDD. Since the ‘not responding’ symptoms are fairly consistent, a single run of memtest86+ should be sufficient to check out the RAM. I got my copy from UltimateBootCD.com.
Just as ‘familyman14’ experienced, my recovery from a rootkit virus attack on a computer did not overcome the apparent slowness. As luck would have it, I saved a cloned copy of the HDD on a 2nd HDD and brought back onto the 1st HDD. A repeated step to remove the virus and miraculously the slowness was gone, along with the virus. However, the defrag operation cited above tends to debunk my theory that refreshing the HDD improved the performance.