I've had to reinstall nearly all programs
 

It started out with my PDF Printer freezing whenever a new job was queued. Uninstalling and reinstalled usually fixed it. Now that has completely stopped working. Then it was KeePass, my password manager. That stopped working. I had to uninstall it (failed the first time), delete all remaining files, and reinstall.

Now it seems everyone of my programs that I have installed on my computer refuses to work without first being uninstalled and then reinstalled. Needless to say, this has me concerned. I have never experienced such a thing before. The likelihood of all my programs suddenly becoming crap through random errors is highly unlikely, so I suspect there is some cause. I have tested my security with every scanning utility known and have found nothing. Advanced rootkits aside, I doubt that somehow my computer is infected.

I have yet to update my computer with the latest Windows updates, because of the news that the latest updates crashed many HP systems (which I own) and AMD systems (no worries here).

Unfortunately this is a school provided laptop, and the school has thankfully increased the security on their ghost images. Fellow students began experiencing problems with their machines, had to reimage, but were stiffed by the new security feature that prevents them from connecting to the school license server when outside the university. I would rather not mail my laptop to my university for them to reimage it properly only to receive it back three weeks later finding that they did not activate my user name and password on the domain (Yes, they are that good).


So three questions:

1. What the hell is causing this?
2. If there is an answer to (2), how the hell do I fix it or prevent my system from deteriorating more?
3. What freeware imaging software exists that is functional on SATA drives? I was following this TFP thread with interest until Xerxys informed me that the program I found does not work on SATA hardware. I can always try it, hoping something is different.

Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer, System section

Check to see if there are any errors (Red Circle, White X), esp. regarding lots of disk errors and whatnot.

The only time I've seen something similar was when I got a virus and it corrupted every single program I had running at the time. I had to reinstall most of the programs on my PC and ended up formatting because of it. I found out which virus it was and couldn't get rid of it...AVG/symantec couldn't touch it, even in safe mode.

Almost all errors say that the working directory cannot be located... There are a lot of mDrive.vbs cannot be located, and even more msi errors from trying to uninstall pdf creator... other than that it does not show errors from specific programs.


@Lasereth:
Not comforting at all...

Just for shits and giggles, in the command prompt:

chkdsk c: /x /r

Then Y to "Schedule on Reboot", and reboot. May take a few hours.

I would do check disc but that requires the windows discs.

It shouldn't. Just type that in the command prompt in windows. No disk required.

Few thoughts:
1. any .vbs file is questionable by my book
2. I would do a full scan with anti-viral and anti-malware software.
3. If that doesn't give you the results you want

FULL reinstall of the OS (or you might want to consider alternate OS).

ZB

Just ran that, and after two seconds, check disk stopped. I did not catch an error message, just stopped. This is the same check disk when Windows crashes and I let it make sure nothing is screwed up on the file system.

Wenn ich koennte, wuerde ich. Si pudiera, lo haria. I would if I could. If the school didn't dick me over with this security setup for the domain nonsense, my image discs would be in my CD drive faster than you can say, "Boo! I'm a ghost!"