Possible RAM issue?

[SirToaster]

Specs:
MoBo - MSI Z97 G5
CPU - i5 4690k
GPU - MSI 980ti G6
RAM - G.Skill Trident X 8GBx2
PSU - EVGA 850G2
HDD - Seagate Barracuda 2TB STBD2000101
SSD - Samsung 850Evo 500GB (boot drive)
OS - Windows 10 64bit x64

I have no clue what is causing this (sorry if this is the wrong forum) but when I attempt to load programs occasionally they'll become stuck. When going into the task manager's details tab (running Win10) I can see the program attempting to boot but I can't end the task, saying I don't have access.

One time after booting up my PC the start menu was missing the 'Power' and 'All Apps' tabs. Programs were also not being placed into my system tray. Not sure if they were booting up at all. Which forced me to do a tower reset, and everything then seemed fine. On multiple occasions I've noticed that my antivirus (Avast) wasn't in my system tray, but was open in the task manager.

From what I've gathered I believe the programs are stuck in 'kernel' mode? But if so, I'm unsure what is causing it.

 

[mdsiu]

If you did an upgrade from an earlier version of Windows, I recommend that you record your Windows 10 license key, backup your data and do a clean install.

 

[Tradesman1]

Have you run both a malware and a virus check?

 

[SirToaster]

It's a clean install of Windows 10, but I believe now Windows may be the issue. Or possibly my HDD or SSD. This build isn't even a week old yet.

I did a boot-time scan and saw no infected files, but after Avast rebooted my system programs weren't loading into my system tray. I opened the start menu and typed avast but when trying to click on the app I wasn't able to. After a time the system tray froze in the open position and I couldn't touch it. Right clicked on the task bar, selected Task Manager, nothing opened and I was no longer able to bring up that context menu. After trying to click on the start menu again to bring up avast, the start menu opened and then I was unable to click on it or bring it away. After a short time a 'Microsoft Windows' isn't responding window popped up at the top left of my display and my cursor turning into the loady circle (haha). Clicking wasn't working so I couldn't 'End Task', and neither was my tower's soft reset, so I had to shut the PC down through the tower.

After restarting everything seemed to be back to normal except Avast wasn't loading up. I decided to type this out and after a bit it suddenly popped up in my system tray.

 

[Tradesman1]

Might want to uninstall and then reinstall avast? Or try a different Virus program, maybe the AVG free version

 

[SirToaster]

Might want to uninstall and then reinstall avast? Or try a different Virus program, maybe the AVG free version

You think Avast may be stopping my programs from opening properly? I'll try that and see. Other programs are also getting stuck, occasionally, when attempting to open like a game through steam (I recently had an issue similar with Fallout 4) or even Steam itself.

It feels like if I attempt to open programs immediately after boot that I'm moving too fast and my boot-time start-up programs decide to lock up. Since all of this is stored on my HDD I assumed it was possibly that, but Avast is on the SSD and its having issues too.

Also after running Malwarebytes and a boot time scan with Avast, I found 0 threats. But a couple corrupted files in my Star Citizen folder. Although I was in the middle of a redownloading it onto this computer, Crysis seemed to also have a few corrupted zip archives too.

 

[Tradesman1]

Might run a disk check, Win has check disk built in (best to run while you sleeep - takes forever - to run go to command prompt as Administrator and run the command CHKDSK /R /F