Cant Load ANY Programs Or Shutdown PC

Hey, I have been having a problem with my pc for 2 days now, it happened a few months ago aswell, when I start my PC I cant open any windows at all apart from my computer and the command prompt, i cant bring up the task manager with ctrl alt delete, i cant shutdown the pc or restart it, yesterday i had to manually restart it 6 times before it would let me use any programs. Today it did the same but after leaving it for about 20 minutes or so it started working, does anyone know a way of fixing this without formatting my hard drive? any help will be appreciated.

What operating system do you use?
Have tried a virus scan?

windows xp pro, got sp2 installed, and yes i did a virus scan, i dont have anything suspicious on the startup list on msconfig either, so im pretty confused

if you are saying it will eventually come up with progams, then... next time you get it running, do a crtl+alt+del and see how much of the RAM is being used, and how big the page file is. also see what processes are are taking up the most pcu usage, and if it isnt a system process do a End Process, and see if that helps.

-ALL

The biggest one is svchost.exe i believe it is apart of my virus scanner but im not sure, it is using around 30,000 - 35,000k, and this does come on when the computer starts up, could this be it?

Try the following:

• Restart your your PC in Safe mode? Does the problem still occur? If not then the issue is eother with a picece of hardware or software which loads when you startup normally.
• Remove all external peripherals except your monitor, keyboard and mouse. If this cures the problem, add them one by one until the problem comes back. Process of elimination :)

I suspsect that if this is a hardware driver or software issue then the problem will go awy when you start in safe mode. The only thing left to do then is find exactly what is causing it.

svchost.exe is responsible for running DLL's, so don't kill that. It could be that a DLL is causing it to hog your system resources.

svchost.exe runs your Windows services that aren't executable by themselves i.e. are in dll form, the more services you have running, the more RAM this will consume.

I have formatted the hard drive now and reinstalled windows, thanks for all the help though :)