I had a Japanese exchange student use my computer and she was viewing Asian language websites. I have no idea if she installed something or not but ever since then my computer performance bogs down over time. Programs take longer and longer to open and eventually get to the point they won't open at all.  I have run numerous spyware programs, virus scans, cleaned temp files from everywhere, ran a registry cleaner after which my system snapped back immediately to top performance and I thought I fixed the issue, only to start slowing down again after about an hour. Also the longer I use my computer I start getting errors that files or folders cannot open due to an "unknown error" occuring and has to close. These errors increase the longer I am on the computer. It almost acts like a memory leak or something loads while my system is idle. I have also used msconfig and stopped certain processes and that seems to work for a while, then within an hour I am right back to dog slow again.

 

I have a Pent 4, 3.2ghz, 2gb Ram,  2 160gb hard drives......so performance should really not be an issue, and wasn't till now.

 

Anyone have any ideas? Could she have downloaded something that my scanning programs do not find or a virus that Norton doesn't recognize?  I'd really rather not format if I can help it.