For some reason, programs that have been working perfectly in the past are now having fatal errors every time I try to open them.
The crash window, "_______ has encountered a problem and needs to close." is becoming very familiar with me and has made it so I can't use some of my favourite programs. Message occurs at the very initialization of the program, not even midway through.
Virus/spyware scans find nothing, uninstalling/reinstalling programs have no effect, I don't know what else it could be.

Have you run ChkDsk? Try that. Also, I still believe you should go to the Security and the Web forum here and read the stickies. Some infections are so deep that it takes extra work to even discover them and remove.

You can use the event Viewer to find the Errors that correspond to the crash:

Follow this path: (for Windows XP)
Control Panel> Administrative Tools> Event Viewer> Click on System & Apps, one at a time on the left> look for Errors on the right> right click error> Properties> note description of error, Event# and Source.

There is a "copy" button below the up/down arrows. Click that, then go to any place that allows you to type (ie. notepad, wordpad, this board) and you can paste (use CTRL-V) the entire event details there. It makes for easy reporting of the event.

If you want to paste the Event here, you do not need to include the lines of code that follow the Description- but paste all else. You will be looking for Error that occurs at the time of the problem. Please ignore Warnings.

You will likely have repetitions of the same Error. If they have the same Event ID#, the same Source and the same Description, only one copy is needed.

Bobbye