Many programs randomly closing...sort of.

[Iconoclast]

Hi, I'm new here, and have a question.

I've recently had a lot of programs randomly give me the message that "X has encountered an error and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience'. However, what I can do is drag this box somewhere and continue using the program. Of course, when I do this a few times, the PC lags badly and is barely usable, but one is usually alright.

Anyway, some of these programs include Windows Media Player, games, AIM, MSN, and Yahoo. I particularly noticed before that WMP would close when I activated this last.fm plugin, but now it's just trying to whenever I start it. It also says that the drwatson 'postmorten debugger' has crashed which makes no sense because doesn't that thing check the hardware for problems?

I tried scanning my PC with nod32 and awhile back found one spyware thing, which I deleted. Nothing else seems to be wrong, except that about a week ago I had a blue screen crash. Things started up okay but it appears that the number of songs in my library has been reduced slightly. And for awhile after it nothing was wrong at all.

So...help? I can still use my computer but it's horribly annoying.

 

[carnageX]

Could possibly be bad RAM. You could try downloading Memtest86, burn the ISO to disc, boot off of it, and run the test for at least 4 hours minimum. If any errors at all come up, that means the RAM is bad. That's the first thing I'd try. Any other software/hardware installs/updates that you did recently?