Mysterious software lag

[HeTiCu]

I am hoping someone here may have encountered this issue before and can advise.

About 2 months ago I left my 32GB USB drive plugged in after powering down and when I powered up the next day I got the "No boot manager present" message. I thought my SSD had lost the boot sector so I used EaseUs ToDo recovery disk to recover a backup of my OS. When I tried to boot up afterwards, I still had the error message. It was then I discovered the USB drive still plugged in. So, I removed it and was successful at booting up. However, I noticed that one of the gadgets I had on my desktop was not responding. It was the "Drives Meter". It turned out that it was just working very slowly; like in very slow motion. After failing to determine what the issue was, I removed it from the desktop, but only on my main pc. It still works fine on my laptop.

About a week ago, Firefox rolled out v44.0 and I upgraded. Right away it started crashing and not connecting to web sights. After a frustrating week of this I decided yesterday to try uninstalling BitDefender AV software to see if that was causing the problem. It turned out it was (or so it appears). Firefox is back to normal.

But now I needed to find another AV so I did some research. I decided to try out McAfee (30 day trial) so I downloaded and installed it. After rebooting I found that McAfee would not launch... or so I thought. It was actually taking 10 mins (no exaggeration) to launch, and another several minutes to respond to any buttons or actions. Like it was in a black hole where time was slowed way down. So I called their tech service and Liza logged onto my pc via remote. She tried for 40 mins (again no exaggeration) to get it to work and she could not, and had no solution. So I uninstalled it and put MS Essentials back on (for now).

I can't help thinking that there is some kind of relationship between the very slow operation of the Drive Meters gadget and the very slow operation of the McAfee software. All of the rest of my software progs (and there are many) work fine. I thought maybe the SSD was starting to go bad but after running 2 different diagnostics software progs, and getting a "Good 100%" result, it doesn't appear to be hardware related. I am now wondering if the recovered OS is somehow corrupted. Or, is it possibly something in the registry that has been corrupted?

I would appreciate any advice, suggestions or experiences that may shed some light on this issue. It is very puzzling. Thanks!

 

[strollin]

Did you happen to look at Task Manager while either of those were running slowly to see which processes were consuming the most cpu and/or memory? If the 2 are related as you suspect, I'd guess they are both accessing some common dll that is corrupted or otherwise compromised.

 

[HeTiCu]

No, I had not done that. However, when the McAfee tech (Liza) was logged into my pc she did check Task Manager for CPU usage, and it was down around 8%, which is typical. I just launched Drives Meter (Gadget) and am looking at the Processes and it does not appear to be using anything. Sidebar is popping up every now and then under CPU, and appears to be holding a consistent ~93mb of memory usage, which is far below what Firefox is using right now. Drives Meter is still acting very slow and clunky.

Earlier I tried booting into my OEM Windows 7 DVD to use the repair function, but it told me I had the wrong software version. I suspect that is because the 2009 disc does not include SP1. I just downloaded SP1 .iso a bit ago and burned it to disc. I am going to reboot now and see if it will access the repair function. If you think of anything else, feel free to comment. Thanks!

 

[HeTiCu]

Well, I tried using the repair feature on the Win7 COEM disc, but it only wanted to repair startup issues, and since that is not the issue, it was not the solution.

I then thought that maybe I could use Total Commander to compare the dll files in the System32 directory on my laptop to the System32 directory on the desktop. That was a waste of time. There are 4398 dll files in the System32 directory alone! That doesn't include the thousands scattered all over C: drive.

It's beginning to look like, to me, that it's useless to back up O.S.'s, as restoring them does not return the system to full health. I'm also thinking I may end up clearing the C: drive (SSD) and starting over with a fresh install. Unfortunately that means dealing with MS over the activation key, and SolidWorks over my license. If anyone has any other ideas, feel free!