A friend of mine is having an odd porblem on his machine. It bluescreened the other day (he can't remeber what it said but he thinks it was something about the harddrive) and now certain programs run extremely slowly, e.g. skype or windows media player, skype taking about two minutes to load. The excepttion is in safe mode where things start fine, however the sound is disabled in safemode so I thought maybe it was something to do with that too. If anyone happens to know what that might relate to, or if someone can tell me if the machine keeps a log of the error when it bluescreens so I could look up what happened at least that would be good. Thanks

None of us have crystal ball - have your friend provide you with the exact BSOD message/code. I hate to waste my time building scenario after scenario. i_XpUser

First things first; have you run up to date virus and spyware scans? sLLs

Well, like I said, he doesn't know exactly what the BSOD said, otherwise I would have put it, hence me asking at the end if anyone knows if the machine keeps a log of such things... And yes, we did run a virus scan, though that is causing problems too and didn't want to update, so it wasn't perfect. I'll get him to run a spyware scan if the computer is willing...

Have him run a few scans. Your mentioning that the spyware scans gave him trouble leads one to the possibility of an infection or infestation. It's difficult to try and interpret "And yes, we did run a virus scan, though that is causing problems too..." Some malicious malwares can impede / disable some spyware scanners. If he can't run (brand a) have him try (brand b)... I like the free SuperAntispyware, because it gets updated with new definitions very often. Sadly, Adaware and Spybot have become "has beens".. so sad too; they were good at one time.

If you can't run any up to date scans, slave the drive to another computer and run the scans. sLLs