Very strange soft lock problem?

Any explorer process that attempts to access network resources soft locks and will not terminate. The rest of the system continues to function completely fine and I've even ran prime to see if the clock might have become unstable suddenly and there doesn't seem to be any problems in that department. Other types of applications which don't rely on explorer for network access work fine, like opera and mozilla or games. The first page in IE will load fine but as soon as I try to navigate to a different site, it hangs, though I can refresh the home page.

I've managed to 'repair' the problem by re-installing internet explorer from a XP disk but I'm worried now about how the data got corrupt in the first place. The only thing I can figure is a random disk sector failing as these files are the sort that are written one time. I'm going to be ****ed if one of my disks is failing, I have the worst luck with disks.

Apparently I spoke too soon... now most every program will lock up in one manner or another. Safe mode runs great but I don't seem to be able to get to the root of the problem. I guess I'll have to do a clean wipe of the OS. I ****ing hate doing that but I suppose it will be faster than troubleshooting this problem. First time I've had any serious problems with that machine

Issues with your RAM can cause the following symptom:

Crashes in normal mode, possibly crashes before reaching the desktop when in normal mode.

But fine in safe mode.

I actually figured out the problem. I have a plantronics DSP-500 headset which runs off usb. I patched my usbport.sys driver for 500 Hz mouse report rate. I didn't restart my system for about a week, totally forgot about it. Reboot my system, and I notice every application is hanging and the system BSODs out. Very strange, figured it would be related to my overclock. So I restore the system to bone stock settings, still crashing. I tried to restore system files with sfc /scannow but the process yielded no change (guess it doesn't index usbport.sys in the 50 megabyte default).

I think safemode was stable because it doesn't load audio drivers. I guess that should have been a big indication it was a driver issue (bangs head). Could have saved myself a bit of time there...

The reason I even figured out what the problem was is because I patched the usbport driver again on the fresh system and then I got all the same symptoms unless I unplugged the headset. Fortunately, the patcher makes it straight forward to restore the original version of usbport.sys so it wasn't really a big deal what I reckognized what the problem was. Moral of the story!: Don't forget to reboot... or perhaps, don't buy plantronics headsets. I guess patching the usb system driver isn't the best method for increasing mouse report rate, I wonder how the copperhead drivers do it?