Windows 7 won't open just a very tiny amount of new/altered programs, everything else works fine

So just recently I've noticed that just a very tiny amount of programs simply don't open, even though I can prove they open fine on another computer. And when they fail to open on my computer, they freeze, never display a window, and cannot be terminated using task manager or process explorer.

Probably doesn't help at all but this is what one looks like in process explorer

Like in that example, it's the 1.25 patch for a game. It freezes and never opens. The 1.29 patch works fine! The 1.25 patch works fine on another computer! And it's barely any programs that do this, but whichever ones do will fail no matter what, freeze and be completely incapable of terminating (forcing me to reboot). And it's only new programs that I've recently downloaded, but even then it's less than 5% of them. The ones that freeze will never run, even if I reboot, rename, whatever... They're toast. But they are not corrupted and run on other computers if I copy them over.

If I try to get clever and do things like view the threads tab in the properties of the process, I can try to suspend the thread but it says "Unable to suspend thread: The system cannot find the file specified". Other times trying this has hardlocked my computer.

Any additional info that could be useful? And any ideas as to what could cause such a weird thing?

Recent Questions...