Vista - Strange Vista task errors- Help!

I'm just going to come out straight and ask for help, as this has completely stumped me:

I'm not sure exactly when this happened, but some odd things have been happening to my Vista laptop, starting with the most annoying one-

1. Whenever I right-click (no matter what window) and hilight "new", instead of a menu asking me what I would like to create "new", windows explorer crashes and I have to restart it, which means that I cannot create new folders. This is EXTREMELY annoying, as I have to copy and paste a pre-made folder I made every time I want to make a simple empty folder.

And second-

2. This is the problem that came shortly before the first one: my task bar freezes. When I booted up my laptop one day, the task bar was frozen, and whenever I moused over it, the double sided arrow icon came up (the one you get when you want to raise or lower something) or the loading icon, and I could not do anything. Pressing the Windows logo (on the screen or on my key pad) did not open the start menu either. shortly before any of this, the start menu did not show any programs, even when I added something to it by pinning or dragging and dropping. Eventually I was able to overcome this by booting the computer up in safe mode and changing the start menu to the classic view. Although I can use the task bar and start menu again, I would much rather prefer the default Vista start menu, as it was more appealing and useful.

And finally, third-

3. Whenever I drag something to from a folder to the desktop, it doesn't appear until I right click and re arrange the menu, which will spread my icons all over the desktop.


Methods I have used are deleting programs I don't use anymore, and deleting Google desktop, a supposed resource hog. None have had any affect to helping my situation. My computer most likely has no virus, as I have scanned it multiple times with Norton 2008, all of which showing no viruses.

Help would be greatly appreciated.


UPDATE: I have recently figured out that, for some reason, Windows Defender had turned itself on, which was conflicting with Norton 2008. This has fixed the "new" hilighting problem (problem 1), but not anything else. It is strange, however, that someone else on another forum reported an incident very similar to mine, so the two thing must be related, how I do not know.