Windows services stop and computer crashes at roughly 2 minutes after boot

[Karmah]

Yesterday I was going through an old email account of mine and I made the mistake (I presume) of opening up an old email I had last year, and I believe this may have been the root of my issue, but here are the details.

After fully launching Windows, I can use it to all most it's full potential, but after roughly 2 minutes I notice the audio cuts out and the Windows audio service stops running, I cannot launch msconfig at that point because the service for that doesn't work and the windows update service stops as well, and finally the Task Manager itself looks as if it were put into a windows 98 style and doesn't actually do anything; I cannot end or start process or anything, but only view processes that are running and the memory they are using.
Shortly after programs start freezing, then crashing and then explorer finally crashes.

I've tried but I cannot cause any of this to happen earlier so I doubt my hard drive is failing because everything works perfectly fine before hand.

However a constant since this incident is the inability to access windows update properly, such as I cannot update Microsoft Security Essentials.

I have ran multiple virus scans on key areas and haven't found anything, but I can only do it for so long before it crashes.
I have also booted into safe mode and the same thing happens, infact it some how booted me off by shutting down and booted up to my other hard drive's copy of windows which I haven't used in a long time, now giving me the option to scan for this virus from a functioning copy of windows.

I'm running Windows 7 Home Edition 64bit, all of my hardware is fine, no new hard ware in a while.

My question to you guys is this, have any of you heard/had anything like this? Is there anyway I can identify what this is and get rid of it?
I can back my stuff up to my alt drive, but I'd rather fix my windows then go through the trouble of formatting, re-installing windows and everything I had on it including gigabytes of updates.