I'm listing the symptoms here, as I don't have a clue what's causing this.

1. On Monday I was surfing in Firefox when the desktop just crashed (this almost 
never happened in firefox but usually in IE after long surf sessions). Explorer.exe 
failed to revive it, I had to navigate using Ctrl+Alt+Del for a while, but then I 
decided to reboot to restore the desktop.

2. On reboot, I clicked on stuff and they just won't respond, for instance the internet 
login link would not open, clicking on Start, the button would just look depressed 
without actually opening the Start menu.

3. I rebooted in Safe mode and things worked fine, I tried ccleaner, spybot (results 
were clean), stinger (clean), SDfix, Combofix. Nothing made a normal startup work 
as normal.

4. Finally thought of System Restore -- restored to last Thursday (April 3), things 
went back to normal.

(Things stayed normal for  2 days)

5. Wednesday, was surfing again, opening explorer windows began to look buggy again 
in that the whole menus would not display right, so I rebooted.

6. Same symptoms as (2) above, so I rebooted in Safe mode.

7. In Safe mode, Combofix failed to initialize, used SDfix until it asked for restart, 
restarted but the log failed to show up as the desktop totally hanged midway.

8. Back in Safe Mode again, tried to look for a System Restore point, there was none! 
I thought they are only deleted after 90 days?

9. Still in safe mode, tried running Spybot again, the screensaver kept starting 
after 1 minute, I right clicked on desktop to set it to 15 minutes, it just set itself 
to 1 minute again (malware?). Spybot showed a clean result.

10. Rebooted normally, hanged a few times when opening a folder, clicking on the 
manual internet login link or even right click desktop (will not show desktop settings 
menu).

11. Reconfigured router to auto-login mode to bypass the manual login desktop link, 
managed to connect to internet.

12. Tried to make a HijackThis log, failed on two reboots, each time it shows:

"This action cannot be completed becasue the other application is busy. Choose "Switch 
To" to activate the busy application and correct the problem"

It just stayed that way with the error message, I clicked Switch To and Retry without 
success.

Strangely, the Windows Task Manager's performance tab did not show a high CPU or 
PF usage,

13. I used ccleaner's registry cleaner in Safe Mode, there's a bunch of stuff related 
to Real player, so I deleted them all and uninstalled realplayer.

- combofix could run again
- ran SdFix but the log that appeared on a normal boot can't be saved as it hanged 
when I chose"Save as.." but I saw the words "Trojan Found.." in the log.
-A Spybot scan showed nothing 

(all the above were done while in Safe Mode)

I'm now in Safe Mode, I can't navigate in normal mode as the system will hang upon 
opening anything.

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