Long-term hardware and/or software problem, not sure of the cause...

Short story: About two hours ago I restart my computer and when it loads into Vista I get a whole bunch of messages in the taskbar saying I have corrupt system files (Apoint.exe, NHC.exe, GrooveMonitor.exe). It also says it can't load the sidebar because settings.ini is being used by another program. If I run antivirus (Symantec) I eventually get a bluescreen (code: 0x0000007F). When I restart I get a message from Vista saying it wants to send microsoft the following crash information: BC Code: 1000008e, BCP1 C0000005, BCP2: 044833A9, BCP3: A8C649F8, BCP4: 00000000.

I just finished chatting with Dell about it and they think it's because they sent me a blank hard drive. They're sending me one with my OS pre-installed. Anybody have any thoughts as to whether this will solve my problems and/or why my problems have emerged?


Long, historical story: So, I'm going to start out by going through the history of the problems I've had with the computer, because I think they are (or mostly are) interrelated.

Got my computer in the middle of August. Hard drive clicked a lot, so I had it replaced after the first couple of days. I had dell send me one with no OS image on it (I got an upgrade copy of Vista Ultimate from my school so I figured I would install the OS they sent me - Vista Business - and then upgrade). That's what I did and things seemed to work (mostly) fine for the next few months. That said, there some problems. Defrag never worked (it would never defrag when scheduled I couldn't get it to manually work) and whenever I scheduled checkdisc to occur on restart it never did. I figured this was just good-old somewhat instable Vista doing its thing.

About a month ago (approximately Nov. 12th) I woke up, checked my email, and then went to the gym. Got back a couple hours later and all of a sudden a message appears telling me that the .net framework (or something like that) was shutting down, then firefox and internet explorer both quit. I restarted and made it to the place right before the vista logo appears and the music plays. There was a quick flash of a bluescreen and the computer restarted (I never could read what the BSOD said). Long story short, I tried starting in safe mode and I tried using all of repair features on the Vista disc. Nothing could get me into windows. Using a CD that let me boot into a fake windows XP environment I was able to salvage all of my files. I didn't think much else of the problem, just figured it was a random error of some sort.

I reformatted and created two partitions (should have done that the first time, I know). Installed the dell version of Vista - worked fine. Installed the Ultimate upgrade and the same problem happens. I couldn't even boot into Vista Ultimate at all. Subsequently I reformatted and tried all over again. Same problem. I did this about four or five times - one time I installed all the dell drivers first, another I downloaded all the Windows updates - no matter what I did I couldn't upgrade to Ultimate. Seeing as how I'm a student with about a month left in class I caved and made myself content with Dell's version. I tried chatting with Dell to see if they had any ideas, at one point one tech said she thought my memory was bad (but after running the diagnostic tests there was no evidence of this) and eventually they said that because I had the Dell version working they couldn't help anymore.

So, I'm content with Vista business for the past month. However, a couple of weeks ago the Word 2007 icon in my start menu disappears. I can't get it back so I go to restore to an earlier version of windows. It won't let me - says I have corrupt system files (it still does today). I restart, boot from the vista CD, and run the various diagnostic tests on it, including check disk (which says it repairs a lot of errors). Restart, try to run system restore and get the same message. Well, I'm still a student (now with two weeks of class) so I ignore it (I eventually found a way to get the Word icon back).

That brings me to the problems I describe at the top of the message.