Another great problem brought to you by Microsoft

I fear to update Vista anymore, because there's always a new trouble with each update. First, the network icon for dial-up went off and dial-up showed not connected after SP2 installation, then bluetooth discovery went dead, after some time whole network center was behaving strangely and finally, week or two before, most strange thing started to happen after a bigger update rollup - a directory or directory link named A or B was created hidden on the system drive, which basically lead to the drive itself, but after trying to remove the directory, explorer hung and eventually went dead- hard reset needed. After a restart or in the safe mode, directory is empty and can be deleted. After some time again, it's back, causing another hang-up. Spybot found nothing, updated ESET Smart Security is always on and found nothing, internet was disconnected, if it's a virus or malware, it's pretty unknown. Enough for my nerves- I did a complete Vista reinstall, this time I also installed Ubuntu just to have at least one reliable system ready.
Well, everything went ok, after installing SP2 from offline package network icon worked ok, bluetooth and wifi as well. My happiness didn't last long indeed- after installing remaining post-SP2 updates, annoying A and B directories appeared again. Any help, or even a confirmation of the same problem would be welcome. Thanx!

... and yes, I know it would be much easier to stick with Ubuntu, but I've already spent lot of money for Vista software to just trash it, so I want to get it working well somehow.

Tech: Vista 32bit Home Premium, SP2, up-to-date @ Lenovo N500 laptop

This is drivers or hardware issue.First update all drivers for everything especially important for chipset,video card,network card ,update new BIOS as well

neither of them. everything worked fine until update. sometime, when i restart laptop, explorer freezes and next time after hard reset there is A dir again. this C:\A dir cannot be remove neither in windows, nor in linux. only safe mode can remove it. but after removal, some next few reboots ahead, explorer freezes again and A dir is recreated. even if i don't remove A dir, after next explorer hang-up, it creates B dir and so on.

hardware-wise, latest drivers are on. i tryied to uncrap whole laptop from every lenovo application to have only standard win services on startup, but that didn't help either.

the A.LNK (directory) itself is defined by explorer as connected drive and it points out to a system drive (whole C: disk). it's hidden and read-only. attributes can be changed. owner is TrustedInstaller. owner cannot be changed. attempt to delete ends in explorer hang-up every time. after such and attempt, hang-up and restart, directory it's not linked to C: anymore and can be deleted.

sfc /scannow outputs that it found errors but was unable to fix them. after going thru log it couldnt resolve sidebar.ini file. this file seems to be locked and cannot be deleted or changed. i turned off sidebar first thing after i installed os.

after going thru event viewer, there are 3 errors. at every start:
1. tvtumon fails to load (Lenovo Windows Update Monitor)
2. SQL Server fails to write to VSS
3. LanguagePackSetup, event 1001 fails to initialize

So far, I couldn't resolve them, not even Lenovo. Disabling the service is not helping.

Chkdsk went fine. No bad sectors, no filesystem errors.

Mem test was good, no errors.

resolved problem with sidebar and settings.ini. i booted ubuntu, renamed whole C:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar folder to WSidebar. Then booted Vista, run sfc /scannow - it repaired Windows Sidebar folder automatically and wrote that found errors were fixed. Then, when I saw new directory has been created, I booted back to Ubuntu and removed WSidebar folder for good.
Note that even after renaming the folder to WSidebar, you still can't remove it from standard Vista environment.

Still, 1001 Event with LanguagePackSetup and tvtumon stays unsolved and I suppose hang-up-directory-creating thing as well.

Final solution:

Today I deleted my Windows partition for good. I got used to Ubuntu, and everytime I booted Windoze, it just kept hanging after some time, meaning for my work unreliable system is absolutely not wanted, not mentioning that I have no nerves for trying to repair system I don't see into and have no broader information about how what works to fix it. Put simply - I finally got allergy on Windows.

So after a month of dual booting I'm absolutely in love with Ubuntu system. There is nothing I couldn't fix or find solution so far, and out of the box it worked much better than Windows, especially hardware-wise (no extra drivers were needed, no crap installed) and desktop is just beautifully simple - it's great for work with tons of free software (instead of windows, free doesn't mean unusable, but quite the opposite)

I'm finally, after a year, satisfied with my Lenovo laptop and that's what matters in the end.