Thank you both for the help. After trying many things, yesterday I ended up reinstalling everything on my HDD. This was actually easy because HP provides the utility to do this on a different partition that comes with the computer (HP Pavilian).
I suspect something was not right in my registry as there were many other subtle symptoms.
I didn't have any files stored on this notebook so the reinstall was fairly painless and took only 30 minutes.
Thanks again.