i went to use my computer and it was frozen on the loading your settings page, which was odd because i had not shut off, or ran a restart on my computer. i had to shut it off, when i restarted i had no taskbar and no programs at all would work, not even the internet. so i restarted and this time i had no icons at all. i restarted in safe mode and nothing would work (internet, wmp). i don't really know what to do, and not being able to use the internet makes it impossible to download the hijakthis that is recommended before posting. sorry for that. i am just wondering if anyone has any ideas or if i should take it somewhere. oh i also tried to start my computer at "last known good configuration" and that did nothing as well.

At this point it would seem that your only choice is to reformat and re-install.

can you please recommend a site that will walk me through the process?
thanks so much.

Try the Microsoft Help section of Broad Band Reports (http://www.dslreports.com)

Glad to report the reformat went smoothly and I am writing this message from the computer that was previously infected. I am so thankful for your help. success with 4 posts!

On second thought, there is a glitch with the way my computer runs now...
... scrolling has become a painful task. it is not smooth at all, and clicking and dragging items brings out a tracer effect. any ideas? was it something i possibly forgot to re-install? thanks.

First, make sure you have all the Windows Updates installed. Then, if still slow, check the Task Manager to see what process is consuming a lot of the CPU (System Idle excepted)

Thanks for your quick reply. Just curious as to how much is a lot?
The top 3 for usage are currently:
1) firefox-37 884k
2) svchost- 21 028k
3) explorer- 16 104k

Generally any program using over 25% of CPU for an extended period of time are suspect. Some programs, such a AntiVirus, Defragmentation software, AntiSpyware, etc, when doing a full system scan may exceed this limit, but would not be considered suspect.

Nothing even comes close to that level of usage. The problem seems to ocur also in notepad, but for some reason i found one web page where it did not occur. which tells me it is not a hardware problem. am i correct in believing so?

No its not hardware. But trying to find out where it is ca nbe time consuming. Lots of slowdowns with recent MS updates over the past five or six months. Most have been fixed, but you never know.

any recent ideas? i still can't figure out the problem.

There have been a lot of prblems reported lately that are associated with MS updates. As of this past Tuesday, I believe all have been corrected. First make sure you have all the MS updates available.