Hello,
Over the past few weeks I've suffered from an increasingly frustrating performance issue with my laptop. Through a combination of running clean boot troubleshooting, and temporarily uninstalling/reinstalling Norton, it seems that my security software is the cause. Whilst not occurring every time I boot up my machine, it is often enough that it is becoming extremely frustrating. The details of the problem are as follows...
Upon reaching the login screen, I'm immediately aware that something is wrong due to the network icon featuring a tiny circle above it, indicating that I am not connected to the internet. Upon entering my login details and being taken to the desktop, I can see that not all items on the taskbar are present, though they will load if I wait a few minutes. Internet performance is much slower than usual and will sometimes fail to connect at all after a while. Arguably the biggest issue however comes from file explorer, which hangs indefinitely if I try to right click something. Upon trying to close explorer while in this state, it crashes, my screen goes completely black, and then my icons/wallpaper will start to load back up, very slowly. Occasionally after this, I will find the start menu to be unresponsive, though that is the one issue that is not always present when my machine is in this state. Restarting the laptop takes much longer than usual, though when the system is restarted, everything loads up fine and I have no problems at all. However I will experience this issue again in a day or two.
So far I've tried running the system maintenance troubleshooter, performing multiple SFC scans and used the DISM tool, none of which detected any issues. I've used ShellExView to disable all third party context menu handlers, which also didn't help. I've performed multiple full virus scans, but all have come up clean. The only action that has stopped this issue from occurring is uninstalling Norton, which I'd obviously much rather not do.
My laptop is a Lenovo Ideapad 300. It came with windows 10 pre-installed. It did have a 30 day McAfee trial installed prior to my installing Norton, but I used their own removal tool to get rid of it, so I don't think that should be an issue. I've checked all of my drivers in device manager, they are up to date and showing no errors. I have the latest Windows updates installed, and my Norton Internet Security is also up to date. Norton itself seems to be fine, with the exception of the Diagnostic Report function; whenever I click this option it just closes the scans window. However all other scans and features still function.
If any further details are required, I shall be happy to oblige.
Any help with this would be very much appreciated.