My horribly flaky hardware had a resurgence of horribleness yesterday with my ill-conceived idea to windowsupdate the thing. After installing 52 security updates, rebooting, installing Service Pack 2, rebooting, then installing the cumulative SP2 security updates (Lord knows how many in there), and rebooting again, my machine is now just as flaky as it was last September. Sigh.
Despite the clear connection between WindowsUpdate and the problems, I believe it's somehow also related to my hardware, and that if I replace it I might extract myself from this mess. My brother has had good luck with Dell, so I point my Firefox browser over to Dell Japan to check out their systems. I see one that looks nice and click on the “configure” link, and am graced with this page:
You don't need to be able to read Japanese to see right away that they are morons. Sigh.
Luckily, there's the most excellent User-agent Switcher extension to Firefox, which is always have on hand. I tell Firefox to tell the Dell website that it's Internet Explorer, and the Dell site is then happy to let me in, and everything works just fine.
I am sorry to hear you are having problems with your system. If you haven’t already you should consider using spybot search and destroy (download.com) and Nod32 antivirus on your machine (nod32.com). I was until recently recommending MS Beta Antispyware, but now that they have done their own coding on the version you can download (windows defender), I do not recommend that piece of work.
Scan your system from safe mode after updating the definitions for the above programs. You might be surprised by what you find.