So… some mixed results.

CCleaner ran without a hitch; I ran both the normal and registry cleaners. MBAM, though… different story. I ran a “full” scan of my C drive, and that went fine, though it did find 2 infected files (more on that below). However, when I tried to run the scan on the H drive, it went REALLY slow as I expected, and could not finish. On Tuesday night, and then again tonight, it made it about an hour in (at which point, it had scanned 50,000+ “objects”), and then the program just hung forever, ultimately needing to be closed with task manager. So, whatever is up with the H drive is confounding not only Avast, but MBAM, too. :stuck_out_tongue:

Haven’t tried Puran yet, so I’ll give that a whirl. SafeSurf, here is a screen of the finished results after the MBAM scan of C:
http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/4898/mbam3111.jpg
and the log:
http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/6734/mbamtextlog3111.jpg

As for this:

As far as I recall, I used only the standard Windows partitioning on the drive. But I got the drive quite a while ago (at least seven or eight months), and - until these slowdown issues that started last week - have had no trouble with it. I must admit I have not taken the time yet to do any more research on 4k-format drives, something I’m unfamiliar with, nor do I know if this drive is one or not (a quick search on WD’s site didn’t reveal anything). But it’s probably not a bad idea to put up this info anyway, so: it’s a Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB internal drive, 3.5", model # WD1000LSRTL.

I did try Dragon NaturallySpeaking out for the first time right before all this started… the program worked decently well, but was a resource hog and tended to be crashy. I don’t know if that has anything to do with this or not (the program, which was on H, was already uninstalled before I made my first post here), but the timing is awfully suspicious.