This is classic symptom of data corruption caused by bad RAM, which in turn is due to normal failure or voltage spikes from failing capacitors. If the computer is more than 5 years old and has the older ESL type capacitors, then that could be the failing of it all.
Google "bad caps" and also check images on it.
If it's just failing RAM, that will cause bad writes to the drives and weird things begin to randomly happen.
I put together a computer for my mom last August. Since we have had problems with hard drives going out, I installed two hard drives, both with windows 7 and the same programs and documents. That way if something went wrong with one hard drive, she could just boot from the other hard drive.
Yesterday, something strange happened with her hard drive. It's sporadic, but at times programs won't open, and once opened, sometimes clicking the X won't close them. Right clicking to close on the taskbar sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. If both those fail, it's a CTR-ALT-DEL to close anything down.
Also the Windows 7 desktop icons can no longer be moved around, no matter what view setting is used. I like to have those icons where I want them, and I like to move them around, but cannot do that.
Then there is a Google Chrome problem. I cannot get to the settings for Chrome. Clicking the Settings icon does nothing. Also when I click on a tab to get to that tab from another tab, it instead closes the tab. Basically the tabs close no matter where you click on them now. The only way to get to a new tab is to do a CTRL-TAB. I uninstalled and reinstalled Chrome, which didn't help.
All of this stuff just all of a sudden began happening. No problem though, because I have another hard drive installed and all ready to go, so I booted it up with that hard drive. Surprise, surprise, surprise -- that hard drive is doing the exact same thing, which leaves me at a complete loss as to what the problem may be. Obviously it isn't a hard drive or Windows problem since it is happening on both hard drives.
HELP! Does anyone know which piece of hardware may be causing this problem? Also in the Control Panel, System, Device Manager, there are NO warnings about anything there. I am totally stumped. I have never seen anything like this before and could use any help or advice anyone may have.

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