Question : Computer suddenly has slowed to a crawl

This issue arose just today but may or may not be related to my 6/5/05 post (which is still unresolved): "CPU usage jumps to 100% and stays there."  That issue goes away whenever I reboot, but this one does not go away when rebooting.
Also, with this morning's issue, the CPU usage in Task Manager always stays below 5% or 10%.

THE PROBLEM: My computer was very fast until this morning.  Now I wait a full minute or two between a keypress (or mouse click) and the response on the screen.  Rebooting doesn't help.  Mouse pointer is not slow, but mouse click is.  The slowness appears to happen only when working with Windows itself.  Other applications (such as ACT) appear to be functioning normally (except that they now take forever to launch).

SYSTEM SPECS: Compaq Presario R3425 laptop purchased in March 2005, running Windows XP Home SP-2 (fully patched).  1.6 GHz AMD Athlon chip; 512 MB of memory; 55 GB hard drive.  Machine is stand-alone, not networked.  Uses built-in wireless (Broadcom); router is connected to a cable modem.  No exclamation points showing up the Device Manager, so it appears that all is well there.  BIOS is up-to-date.

EVENTS PRECEDING THIS PROBLEM: I rebooted this morning and it gave me a runtime error (title bar said Microsoft Visual C++) saying that bcmwltry.exe asked the runtime to terminate it unexpectedly.  I keep clicking OK but it just pops up again right away.  I saw on Google that bcmwltry.exe is the Broadcom Wireless Utility.  I do have that installed on my laptop, but I haven't used it in months.  In other words, I checkmarked the box which says "Use Windows to manage my wireless connections."

In addition to that error message, I get this one: "The Norton Antivirus Auto-Protect Driver could not be loaded. Your system is not protected from viruses. Please restart."  I had never seen either one of these message before today.

Since the previous reboot last week, my 60-day MS Office Trial expired.  That shouldn't be related, but who knows, maybe it is.

WHAT I'VE TRIED SO FAR:
- Several reboots made no difference.
- I used msconfig long ago to disable almost all startup entries.  I also ran a full virus scan with Norton AV 2005 two days ago.
- Machine gets a clean bill of health from Ad-Aware from Lavasoft.
- I kept trying to kill bcmwltry.exe in the Task Manager, but it just kept coming right back a half-second later.
- I went to c:\windows\system32 and renamed bcmwltry.exe to bcmwltryxxx.exe.  When I rebooted, I got all the same symptoms except the error message about BCMWLtry.exe.
- The problem happens whether I have the laptop's wireless switched on or off.
- I've posted today's HijackThis log (version 1.99.1) at the end of the other post mentioned in the first paragraph above.

I would really appreciate any input that you any of you can provide.
(Also, does anyone know of any businesses that will provide tech support via web conferencing for a fee?  I'm continually amazed that either there are no such businesses, or their publicity has been so minimal that I haven't heard about them.  Sounds like a millionaire waiting to happen!)

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Deleted with 500 points refunded
09/07/2005 09:24AM PST
modulo
Community Support Moderator
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Answer : Computer suddenly has slowed to a crawl

Well, Better go to run prompt and type "msconfig".  When System configuration utility appears Why not put a mark in the box by "Selective start up".  Start unchecking the boxes one at a time and rebooting.  By process of elimination, reboot and disable items one at a time until machine runs smoothly.  Hope you can eliminate some items and become very suspicious of those potentially responsible for this slow down.

When you are all done, make sure you reset above utility back to "Normal start Mode".  BTW, I am using a Compaq R3210US laptop and it has not missed a beat in a year.

Good Luck.

bs5