OK, this is my results for your post no. 38. I checked the list of hidden drivers recommended in the first link, but found none matching the ones mentioned there.
So I moved on to the second link. I downloaded the Fixes program and ran it. It hung twice as the progress bar was making its way up. Both times I found Alienware's useless BugSolver,exe process running. I killed BugSolver twice and the program finished. It popped up a message saying I had to reboot. Just as I was reaching for the mouse to do that, the machine did an instant shutdown, ie. just power off. When I rebooted, I immdediately got a
Stop c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The session manager initialization system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000034 (0x00000000, 0x0000000) The system has been shut down.
I rebooted again. This time it started Windows but I got a message "The primary display adaptor is not configured properly. To avoid complicating the situation, this program will terminate" (But it didn't say
what program). And my video drivers are gone. The machine is now running in straight VGA mode, 800x600 (it sure looks weird - normally it does 1600 x 1050). While I was pondering this, I got another "Blumblebee" warning from Avira, again in System Volume Information. It looks like SVI is infested with these. So I was about to just dump the SVI when I got your post above recommending doing exactly that. So I will do that before proceeding with the rest of the Fixes.
[...time passes ...]
I cleared the SVI directory. That went OK. Note to anyone else reading this: there is a step missing in kimsland's procedure above (you might want to edit that) You need to reboot after turning off System Restore for it to actually empty the directory.
Then I reinstalled the Nvidia drivers and rebooted. The system came up in normal mode at full resolution. I located the runmbam.exe icon on the desktop and double-clicked it. I got a "Missing shortcut" error. So I started over, downloaded Fixit.zip again, extracted the files, moved the Fixes folder to the Desktop, opened that, double-clicked on Fixit.cmd (which ran "The Brute Force Uninstaller"). This time I got no interruptions from BugSolver. Fixit ran to completion. I got the "Reboot now" message and was able to click "Yes" to that. This time Windows apparently ended normally and then rebooted normally. I double-clicked the runmbam.exe icon but got the same "Missing shortcut" error. So I guess I'm done. Now what?
[...more time passes ...]
I noticed that the Indexing Service was enable on Drive C, so I decided to uncheck the box for that since it slows down the system. I told it to apply to all folders and subdirectories. It was going along and suddenly stopped with "An error occurred applying attributes to the file: C:\Program Files Access is denied." I clicked Ignore and it started going into Program Files anyway, only to stop with the same error for Program Files\Adobe\Reader 8\AcroRdIF.dll, Common Files\Adobe\ActiveX and AcroIEhelper. Acrobat is not running. It did the same thing for a bunch of files in the Prefetch directory. Is that significant?
{.. tick tock ...]
I found this URL:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=228985 dealing with the CD drive won't read problem. The first thing that applied was Method 7, Restart using a clean boot, meaning they want me to do a Selective Startup in msconfig. Clearing the Startup items went fine, but when I tried to clear the non-MS services I got "An Access Denied error was returned while attempting to change a service. You may need to log on using an Administrator account to make the specified changes". But I am an Administrator (and sole user). I tried unchecking the non-MS services one at a time and it turns out they are
all "access denied". So I'm like, what the...? I just exited msconfig and rebooted. Anyway, that didn't work. Neither did forcing PIO only mode on the secondary IDE. Foo.