system hanging, sometimes showing no icons on startup

I have a Toshiba Satellite , win7 X64,home premium, factory windows version.

When I tried to start up it went into my user account but with no icons.
I then shut down power, restarted in safe mode, which was ok.
I restarted and went into another user account. That one had the icons.
If I switched users and went back into the original account, I had the icons, but when I tried to start an application
I got a box that said "The application is not responding, choices were, continue processing or cancel.
If I clicked cancel, I got an opaque screen showing the icons beneath but I could not click on anything.
If I clicked on continue processing I just got an hour glass and couldn't do anything.

I'm running chkdsk/r now.
Any ideas?

It's a newish Toshiba so the harddrive is suspect right off the bat. I would find out who actually made the drive and get their diagnostic software and check it from a boot cd. If it's actually a toshiba/fujitsu here you go.
http://storage.toshiba.com/storage-s...ware-utilities

I would also suspect a borked profile. Set up a new profile in Safe Mode, and copy your data from the original non-working profile there ( My Documents, Favorites, etc. ) and then delete that profile. Reboot, and see if the new profile works reliably. Good luck!

You might try using System Restore to restore your computer's system files to an earlier date when everything was working correctly. It's a way to undo system changes to your computer without affecting your personal files, such as e-mail, documents, or photos.

Can you go through this checklist?

1. Did you install any new software in the week before the issue?
2. Do you have any Antivirus? If so what brand/version?
3. What 3rd party utilities do you have? (Examples: Registry Cleaners, System Optimizers, etc)
4. Have you done an anti-malware scan? What program did you use?
5. Are you the only person who uses the profile in question?

I tried my acronis restore but it failed to read the archive.

Now i want to restore from the factory partition on the drive.

I cant get to the screen to recover the system because its trying to
Do a repair and keeps restarting the system. I cant cancel it.
just does it again on start. F8 is supposed to bring up the safe
Menu with the restore choices but i cant get there.

Its toshiba c655d s5234

You have the options of recovering your system
using the Hard Drive Recovery partition to the
factory-set default, or recovering just your C: drive
and leaving other partitions (for example, a D: drive)
intact, or changing the size of your C: drive and then
recovering it.
To recover your hard disk drive using the utilities
stored on your computer’s HDD:
1 Make sure the computer is turned off.
2 Press and hold the 0 (zero) key on your keyboard
while powering on the computer. When the
computer powers on, the TOSHIBA HDD