Windows Vista Service Dilemma

Hello everyone. I have a rather tricky problem and unfortunately I'm inexperienced with computer lingo and specifics, however I have a problem on my machine (HP Pavilion a6220n PC) that involves the Service locations. I understand I should give as many details as possible for others to better understand the problem, so here goes: Recently in December '09 I noticed my hard drive working itself audibly much more aggressively than normal (kind of like how you can tell when something sounds wrong with your car because you have driven it for so long) and so I went into my Resource Monitor under the Task Manager and noticed that my disk space was spiking usage up to 99% at random intervals. I examined the files that were being processed and saw some unusual files being named (something like 160+ files) all linked to a folder in my hard drive called "C:\Windows\Service Profiles\Local Service\App Data\Local\lastalive0.dat" and "C:\Windows\Service Profiles\Local Service\App Data\Local\lastalive1.dat" Also there are as many as ten files called "\Device\Harddisk\DR0" that appear at random, disappear, then pop back up. When I attempt to inspect the Service Profiles folder, it tells me that I do not have access to it, yet I'm the administrator, and when I check the permissions, there are three users separate from myself and my computer: CREATOR OWNER, TrustedInstaller, and SERVICE. The CREATOR OWNER only has "Special Permissions" whereas TrustedInstaller has "List Folder Contents" and "Special Permissions" and SERVICE has access to everything but "Special Permissions". Everything on my computer was working fine until right before the new year, when I booted it up. The first thing I noticed wrong was the sound was deactivated. My tower beeped at me with a message telling me that the audio wasn't working properly. Then next problem was when I attempted to get online access (I use wireless) and was denied access to IE. I dove around through my hard drive, inspecting my audio software, which was working normally, unplugged and plugged it back in, and still it would not work. I attempted the same for my wireless device, same result. Then I scoured through my Task Manager and found the "Service" link (I had never check it out before, so I felt it was worth looking at) and looked at the long list of applications, and noticed my Windows Audio program (which is set to work automatically) was set to "Stopped". I tried to turn it on, but I got this message: Windows could not start the Windows Audio service on Local Computer. Error 1079: The account specified for this service is different from the account specified for other services running in the same process. So I delved further, and looked at the "Dependencies" tab on the properties window, and found that the account for some of the dependencies was in fact different (my Windows Audio was runing as "Local System" where the RPC was runing as "Network Service") However there were other Services that were stopped as well (ones that were set to Automatic, and not Manual), and when I attempted to start them up the same problem arose. So I checked out what the error message was implying, and found the "Log On" Tab under properties, and noticed that the Network Service account was password protected, and my Local System was not. I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the problem at hand or not, but I figure I would add it. In short, my computer has no sound, no internet connectivity, cannot write programs into or out of the hard drive (I can play games or run programs that pre-existed this dilemma, but cannot, say, add another album of music to my iTunes or install another game…) and still has incredible hard disk usage spikes (its a 363GB hard disk and gets used up to 99%, which to me is a rather substantial amount of memory). That's about all the information I can think of to list here concerning my computer problem, however I would be glad to provide further information should anyone need it to assist me. Thank you very much for your help and consideration in this matter. I will more than likely attempt to recover as much data from the hard drive as possible (if possible…) before wiping the OS and restarting from scratch, but hopefully it won't have to come to that.

Vista is a god awful beast thats for sure. You may have malware, and you may want to visit the malware removal forum for a checkup. Apart from that, I see nothing here worth trying to fix. You're not likely to find any viable solutions to your issues because it sounds as if some underlying component is corrupted. In this case it is best you just start over.

Well I sure didn't have my hopes up about the whole thing, but I will go check that Malware forum out anyways. Thanks all the same.