total system freeze in very specific situations

[mipptc]

I have Windows 7 Premium Home 64bit on an ASUS G60VX. Specific things are causing it to freeze. It totally freezes, unresponsive, no hdd activity, it never recovers, I have to use the power button to turn it off. It freezes when:

-when I try to launch Steam (after updating, but before/when the Steam interface would come up).
-if I hit shift a bunch of times to bring up sticky keys, then click "no", that instantly freezes the computer.
-I have an old podcatcher (Happyfish) and it has an option to bring up a little notification saying when it's found new episodes. When turned on, that notification freezes Windows.
-the alerts from the latest version of Comodo firewall freeze Windows. I currently have to use an older version.

That's all I've found so far. These all freeze it 100% of the time when I run Windows normally. In safe mode, everything works fine with no freezes. (If only I could play my games like that.) There are no random freezes at all. It's only these specific things.

This started a while ago now, but I thought about it at the time and couldn't remember making any changes to my computer. Obviously I must have done something and forgotten, but I couldn't guess what.

I tried everything I could think of, including updating gpu drivers, running Windows Update, and running a couple virus scans. My earliest restore point when I thought to try that was too recent to help.

I'm out of ideas. The fact that nothing freezes in safe mode makes me think this can be fixed, but I don't know how to figure out what's even causing it.

 

[mipptc]

So apparently it was sound drivers.

I uninstalled my audio driver in the Device Manager, mostly because I was out of ideas, and rebooted. Windows automatically searched my computer for drivers and installed...apparently the same exact drivers I'd just uninstalled. But now, for some reason, everything works. I rebooted to make sure, and it's all working.

To be clear, my sound was working totally fine this whole time. I have no idea why these exact events were freezing my computer, when movies, music, non-Steam games etc. were all fine. Also no idea what caused this to become a problem in the first place, after a couple years of the same setup working flawlessly. But anyway, it's sorted.