gadgets and slow

I have a vista home premium laptop. Recently the system has been extremely slow and freezes constantly. I have norton 360 and everything is up to date as well as windows set to auto update. Yesterday the gadgets went haywire and I have pages of them that just popped up. I checked through windows and norton for malware-nothing. I try to close gadgets by right clicking and by the main gadget link one by one. My computer freezes instantly and I cannot remove them.I have to power down the computer with the power button each time. For awhile it would not reboot just gave an awful tone. Any one out there that can help me figure this out??? Also, I use IE 7 and it has been 'not responding' very, very frequently lately also, maybe it's tied together. Any help would be very appreciated!

jaws


have you tried re booting in safe mode?

do you have a backup we can restore from?

Can you look in your event log and see if there is a specific date and time this occurred?