Drivers Corrupted (Code 3) - Unfixable!?

[rIKmAN]

OK, before I start I know I can reformat and reinstall Windows easily enough, but the thought of having to reconfigure settings, tweaks, re-installing software, backing everything up etc means I will try as hard as possible to fix the problem before I have to go down that route, so....

I was using my PC watching iPlayer or SkyGo or something, and it powers off on its own, as though the plug was pulled out of the wall. Turned it back on, booted slowly, lots of hard drive thrashing and then it all seemed fine again, if a little sluggish.

It wasn't until I plugged in my iPod later on that it popped up an "Installing Drivers" box, followed by a "Failed to install Device Drivers" message, weird.

So I checked Device Manager to see whats up and I see exclamation marks all over the place, including my CPUs, On-Board Audio, DVD Drive, Daemon Tools Virtual CD-ROM, both Monitors, Firewire Controllers, PCI standard ISA Bridge.

The actual message says: "The driver for this device might be corrupted, or your system may be running low on memory or other resources. (Code 3)"

I thought maybe a stick of RAM had gone, but they are both fine (2 x 2gb) so its not a low memory issue.

Now the CPUs has me baffled, never had that before in 15yrs of owning PCs, so anyway long story short, I have tried to fix the problem but have had no luck.

Here is what I have tried so far...

1) Tried uninstalling the drivers, and reinstalling from both Windows Update, and from Manufacturer Drivers.
This uninstalls drivers fine, but gives the same "Failed to install drivers" message, and if I let Windows search it tells me the best driver is already installed (but it's corrupted, code 3)

2) I have run an SFC /SCANNOW which reports no problems or errors.

3) I have checked my C: drive with chkdisk, telling it to repair bad blocks and it also found no errors.

4) I have run a full AVG scan (including rootkit), MalwareBytes scan, CCLeaner scan(including registry clean), and finally ComboFix and nothing was found except a few false positives on .exe files I know are not viruses.

5) Tried "Rolling Back" to a previous driver, but there were none to roll back to.

6) Read some info about it maybe being linked to "Wdf01000.sys" in system32 but was unable to move/delete the file as per the guide, as when I confirm the "Need to be admin" box, it then tells me I need permission from "TrustedInstaller"

When I looked at the permissions on the file, I cannot change them for any user as the boxes are greyed out.
I didn't want to do any "Take Ownership" etc as I didn't want to make things worse.

The computer works fine, but its very sluggish, like the drivers arent installed (obviously) but I just can't seem to get any new drivers on there and its getting silly now.

So, sorry for such a long post, but if anyone can help I'd really appreciate it.

[wakadoo]

did you try a system restore...TrustedInstaller is the program that looks for windows updates, can it be stopped while you try to delete the files.

[muttleymacclad]

I'd try a system restore.
Sounds like its almost running in a type of safe mode if it's not loading drivers.


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[rIKmAN]

Cheers for the replies guys, but there are no system restore points to restore from.

TrustedInstaller is in the list of Owners/Users in the permissions dialog waka, but I can;t change any options for any of the users with regards to the permissions on that file.