strange quick launch behavior

So, the other day my laptop running Vista Home Basic decided not to shut down all the way and I had to give the old 5 second power button press to get it to reboot.

Normally that goes fine, but this time, at first it came back spinning a bunch of filenames in black and white, a la pre-BIOS (I think?) time. Then, when it did come back, it seemed to be going through a Windows Update, giving me the "3 of 3 updates are completing" message.

Now, I have automatic updates turned off, so don't know what could possibly have updated itself, especially when I looked at last updates in Windows Updater and it said I hadn't changed anything since the end of last year.

When the laptop finally booted all the way up, I found two odd (new) behaviors:

1) the quick launch bar was resized to what looks like the default (too small for what I have in there)

2) when I unlock the taskbar and slide the size of the quick launch area out, if I try to right click any of the programs, it spins its circle for a while, then gives me the OS message that it can't open Windows Explorer and asks if I want to close the program. Now, this is odd for two reasons. First, I wasn't trying to launch Windows Explorer, only get some info through right-click from some other program. Two, once I tell it to close the program, it resizes my quick launch area back to the size I just changed it from!

I know a bit about computers, and for the life of me, I have no idea what is going on...

Anyone ever experience such a thing?

Thanks.

Welcome
Lets check the most important thing first
Run a full anti virus scan
Downloand and runa a FULL and updated scan with the free malwarebytes

Why not just do a system restore to a couple days ago?

We should not make a system restore if there is a problem with a virus, it could be spread to or from the points.
You can make a system restore if you are sure that the point you are using is clean.