Windows Vista Windows not completing startup

Here's the problem, in a nutshell. Last night, my computer was having issues with the Internet. Some Programs worked fine, namely windows live messenger and wow. But xfire, neverwinter nights were not. Shut it down, went to bed as I've had this problem before on this computer.

On startup today it has reached a whole new, exciting level of not good. Only a handful of processes started on startup. Windows media player, picture viewer, notepad are the only programs that will run. Everythig from firefox to msn won't even start. No process, nothing. All very confusing, and I'm posting from my phone because my comp still isn't working. Tried restarting it and nada.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

This could be a number of different things but I would start with a test on the hard drive. Also please tell us of any error messages you see on screen. Will it run in safe mode?

Identify the make of your hard drive and then use one of the links below to get the manufacturers diagnostic for ISO CD. Burn the image file to a CD, boot the PC with the disc in the drive and run the diagnostics. You first need to set the CD drive to 1st in the boot order in the Bios setup.

Please use this free software if you do not have an image burner. http://www.memtest.org/

Could you also fill in your System Details so we can see what type of PC we are dealing with.

 

Try booting into Safe Mode (F8 at startup) and see if you can run programs there. If so, it might be a program loading at startup that is crashing. You could disable startup programs with msconfig.