Random freezes and Blue Screening

My computer has become more and more prone to failure lately. I turned it on last night and left for a while only to come back to a blue screen.

Sometimes shortly after booting up, it will freeze momentarily, the red HDD light stays lit, and then will come back after about a minute or 2.

Not to mention every time I boot up, I get to my desktop no problem, but then I have to sit and wait for several minutes while something loads. I dont know what it is. If i put my cursor in the task bar, it becomes the hour glass and I cannot click anything. After a few minutes, my icons start showing up in the lower right corner and I can go about my business.

I have checked to see if anything is running and taking up a lot of resources on start up. I have made sure nothing unnecessary starts up. I have AVG and checked to see if that was causing problems and after an uninstall showed that it was not the problem, I system restored back. I have run virus scans, adware, spyware, disk defrags, registry derags, registry checks, mem test, pretty much everything under the sun.

I have even posted on here several times. So I guess this is a challenge to see who can solve this problem, preferably without reinstalling because honestly, if I am going to reinstall, I am just going windows 7.

Thank you and good luck.

Yeah I get the task manager up and it never seems like anything is going on, maybe lik 2-5% CPU usage. I will check out this autorun thing when I get home.

run msconfig. Scan through the boot processes and disable any that you don't want starting on boot. Check your startup folder to see what programs are starting as well. It sounds like some routine maintenance. You may want to defrag and run a chkdsk as well.

One other thing I thought of is to check task scheduler and see if anything is turned on in there.