Scan, hang, scan, hang, HELP

[sawdust123]

I have been having trouble with my PC the last few days. It started a day after I loaded Java update 24 so my wife could run Scrabble from EA games. Her computer started freezing up and on reboot she couldn't get back into here account. I ran the manufacturer hardware checks (this is a Dell Inspiron 15R) and all is fine. I booted in Safe Mode, uninstalled update 24, ran msconfig to clean out the start up programs and the non MS or Intel services and used CCleaner to clear out other junk as well. This got me back into my wife's account and some things will now run but not well. MBAM won't scan more than 7 seconds. In Safe Mode, MBAM will scan for several minutes, freeze for nearly an hour, scan again for a few seconds or minutes and then freeze again. I ran MBAM for 15 hours and it wasn't done yet. It scanned 160K files and had found no infections. Not sure what to do next. Any suggestions?