Vista issues a possible source of lag


*I know that this is really long but I tried to explain in detail what
I've done to attempt fixing the problem. Hopefully it makes it easier
for anyone to help*


I am running an HP Pavilion dv7 Notebook PC with Windows Vista Home
Premium 64 bit. On 4-14-09, I turned on my laptop and found that it was
lagging terribly (applications took a long time to start up,
music/videos were skipping or freezing, etc). Unsure of what the lag was
from, my first hunch was spyware/adware/virus. I ran scans with Windows
Defender, Spybot Search and Destroy, Ad-Aware, and AVG, all resulting in
no detected infections. I checked my processes in my task manager and as
far as I could see, there weren't any suspicious processes. (I uploaded
my task list in case someone actually sees something suspicious)

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/4682/tskmanager1.jpg
http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/9233/tskmanager2.jpg

I also have a little application on my sidebar that monitors system
performance. According to that app (as well as my task manager), my CPU
usage was normal, my ram usage was normal, and my cores were at normal.
With the aforementioned things in mind, I ruled out some kind of
infection as the source of my lag (since I figured that a memory leak or
something like that would show high resource consumption).

Just to make sure, I restarted my computer and went into safe mode. I
figured that since safe mode only boots with the minimal processes, my
computer would run at normal speeds even if there were some kind of
infection. To my disappointment, I found that the lag persisted even in
safe mode.

My next guess was maybe it was just because I had not defragmented in a
long time. I then used the Auslogics disk defragmenter. Even after
completion, there was no apparent improvement in my system's
performance.

I ran every diagnostic that I could find at boot (the ones I can access
by pressing esc or f8 on startup) and they didn't seem to be of any
help. I also ran the "sfc /scannow" command on command prompt but after
it reaches 100% verification, it comes up with a "windows resource
protection could not perform the requested operation" message.

Trying to find when the problem may have rooted from, I looked to my
event viewer.

http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/7936/eventviewerboottimeonap.jpg
http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/7936/eventviewerboottimeonap.jpg

As can be seen from the screen shots, my boot time nearly doubled going
from April 13th to April 14th. Every boot time since the 14th has been
consistently about double of my original boot times. I found this very
strange since I keep my startup programs very minimal.

With this in mind, I tried to look back as to what major actions I took
on the 13th or 14th that may have damaged my computer. This is when I
noticed the "Window has an update" icon on my system tray. I clicked on
it to see if updating might help, only to find that I could not update.
For the most part it would just stay at 0%. Sometimes I would see the
percentage go up but the update would never complete. Eventually, I
would get an error 8007000B.

http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/494/windowsupdateerror.jpg

This is when I started thinking that maybe I messed something up with
Vista during my last automatic update. I tried to run system restore
using different restore points but never managed to successfully
complete one of those either. At first, system restore wouldn't even
load while I was in normal startup. When it eventually did, after
restarting, I would just get this message.

http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/351/sysrestoreerror.jpg

I rebooted in safe mode and tried to do another system restore but,
again after restart, I got the same message. Finally, I tried doing a
system restore after booting from the Vista recovery partition that came
with my laptop and got a different error message.

http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/4802/systemrestoreerror3.jpg

At this point, my main suspicions were either a busted hard drive or a
damaged Vista installation. I was leaning more on a damaged Vista
because the diagnosticstests should have detected a damaged hard drive
(I think). Seeing as system restore wasn't working, I tried to uninstall
some of the more recent updates from the 14th using the "Installed
Updates" viewer in control panel. I uninstalled most of the updates but
found no difference in my system's performance.

I wanted to run a Windows repair but it seems like that didn't get me
anywhere either. I attempted doing a Vista upgrade install as noted in
this tutorial

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/88236-repair-install-vista.html

However, I encountered problems with the fact that my Vista recovery
was built into my laptop through a partition and HP put protection on
that partition that doesn't allow me to access it (all I get when I try
to explore the drive is a warning message about how I shouldn't delete
or alter those files). Looking at the tutorial, it seems that I can't do
an upgrade install without a physical Vista installation DVD.
Additionally, I think my laptop already has sp1 installed (and the
tutorial says it would not work if sp1 is installed already).

I'm really running out of ideas as to how I should tackle this problem.
My last resort would be to do a clean install using the recovery
partition. I would prefer not doing this since this would require buying
an external hard drive to backup my VERY many files as well as having to
reinstall EVERYTHING. I also didn't want to take such a hasty action in
case a more experience person might be able to point to a proper course
of action. It seemed pointless to do something so drastic if there is a
possibility to avoid it.

I am open for any suggestions and would gladly answer or post screen
shots of things regarding my situation. Thank you all in advance for
reading through this and even thinking about ways to help me. I look
forward to any possible fixes that can be offered.


--
Super Noob
.