Last night, the computer hung while shutting down, and had to do a hard shutdown with the on/off button.
Immediately after, it rebooted up to the desktop, almost completed booting, and then froze completely.
Had to hard shutdown again.
Booted into safe mode fine, but couldn't for the life of me work out what the cause was. Hadn't installed any programs or updated any drivers. For want of anything better I ran a number of dial-a-fix routines, and thought I might install an Erunt registry back-up, although I tried rebooting after dial-a-fix first.
Rebooted fine, and been ok all today, except for an unusual result running SIW.
Received the following error messages as SIW was launching:
The last one is a puzzler, as there is no virtual machine that I'm aware of running. Definitely no Returnil or PowerShadow. I've used this SIW before without these error messages.
The only difference since I last ran SIW is Online Armor Firewall, instead of Windows Firewall.
Tried that Hazel, the middle two error messages above are now gone, but although SIW is now "trusted", I'm still getting "Unknown Windows Kernel", and "A virtual machine (like) is running".
It's still definitely Online Armor causing this. Disabled Online and SIW ran without the pop-ups.
I can live without SIW, but I hate puzzles. I'll have a look around, see what I can find, although I'd be happy for any more suggestions.
EDIT: Rebooted a couple of times, made no difference.