Some programs run slow, others are fine?

[moonlight76]

Earlier this evening I was having some choppiness in various programs (MS Word, a game I was playing), so I opened task manager to check and the CPU usage was basically pegged at 100%, though it kept flickering multiple times per second. Trying to locate what was hogging the CPU, Task Manager hung and was completely unusable, although I could still access my other programs. I shut down the other programs and restarted, and ever since then something odd is happening. Startup takes a little longer than usual, but once it's booted into Windows some of my programs will open and run fine, while others take forever to load, and then work only by fits and starts. For instance, I can load Chrome just fine, but Firefox and Word both take several minutes just to start up and then are practically unusable. Chrome and Firefox are both installed on the same HDD, so I would think that would rule out this being a hard drive problem, but I could be wrong. I have it running a checkdisk on the 2T physical drive at the moment, but a startup checkdisk of the C: drive (SSD, boot drive, also where both Firefox and Chrome are installed) earlier yielded no errors. SATA cables were all reseated to the drives and the mobo to rule out a loose cable and swapped to determine if maybe the culprit was a dying cable.A Spybot scan found no sign of malware. I'm kind of at a loss as to where to go from here and would love some thoughts.

 

[hang-the-9]

Run a few other anti-virus programs, boot off a rescue disk (Avira and AVG both have free ones) and run a scan and also check with Malwarebytes.