Hello,
Thank You for your suggestions.
I checked the page you suggested. The only listings in event viewer for
system restore (srservice) indicate several 111's, which are failure to
restore, and a 110, successful restore for the point I created today.
I let the system go into standby mode, and during the process, System
Restore erased all of my restore points, except for the one I created this
afternoon. So there is at this point nothing to check or repair.
I still cannot get the the scanner to work, with the message indicated in my
original post. And the computer is still going very slow - more than 5
minutes to boot, and it (a 2.4 ghz system) is at this point running slower
than my old 386.
All signs seem to point to malware, but none of the programs I have tried,
including Windows Defender and the ones mentioned in my original post, have
detected anything at all. If it's malware, its very clever malware.
I do defrag the disk every week, along with using disk cleanup; i have more
than 25% free space (more than 3 gb), 512 mb memory and a 768mb swap files,
all currrent patches and updates, and pretty much everything else suggested
by the other posts on this forum about slow computers. And I do not run
multiple applications at a time, other than the Trend Micro PC-cillin;
deactivating that does not speed things up, however.
I don't know whether all these problems are connected or not, but I imagine
that a malware program of some kind could be behind all of them.
Further suggestions welcome and appreciated.