Programs will not start

I have been having big problems just recently with startup programs. Alot of them will not startup (including catalyst, steam, asus wireless ap, etc..) even tough they are in the startup in system configuration. Under services it says they were stopped. Another problem relating to this is that I cannot open alot of these programs even manually, and I can't even open some programs that aren't in startup such as opera, firefox, internet explorer...etc. I ran ad aware, spybot search and destroy, and comodo antivirus, only to show little to no results (3 programs that will run in safe mode.) . I am typing from a laptop right now and I need serious help. The only program i installed was the new update for opera. In task manager it says that about half of the services are stopped.

memory is using 1.45gb (task manager performance)
i am running vista ultimate 64 bit and the only update ive had from windows lately is a windows defender definition update.
running as an administrator does nothing.
went into task manager-> services and tried start the steam client service and it told me "windows could not start the steam client service on local computer. error 1053: the service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion." It does it with the other programs that dont start on startup as well.

event viewer at 9 this morning: the open procedure for service "pnrpsvc" in dll "C:\Windows\system32\pnrpperf.dll" failed. Performance data for this service will not be available. The first four bytes (dword) of the data section contains the error code.

and: The collect procedure for the "emdcache" service in dll "C:\Windows\system32\emdmgmt.dll" generated an exception or returned an invalid status. The performance data returned by the counter dll will not be returned in the perf data block. the first four bytes (dword) of the data section contains the exception code or status code

Edit:_programs run in safe mode...
Only programs that run are 64 bit programs, not 32 bit programs.

fixed...uninstalled comodo..wierd

That's the sometimes unfortunate consequences of those apps. They tend to be a little heavy handed in what they allow to work and what they don't.