My Windows PC (1tb Samsung NVME boot) refuses to open programs (they open in details but don't actually open), restarting explorer.exe results in a black bar that never goes away, and pressing restart or shutdown results in an infinite loop. After doing a hard shutdown, upon boot everything works perfectly fine for a while. Typically the next day or much later in the night the problems will return. Some days it doesn't need a hard shutdown, others it does. It's quite random.
My first instinct was that Windows 11 was the issue because I really started noticing the problem after a build update. I rolled it back, the problem persisted. I used the local restore option, the problem persisted, finally I went scorched Earth and formatted the drive and reinstalled windows fresh off of a USB drive and the problem SEEMED to be okay for a few days but ultimately returned to its old issues.
My next thought was to run the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool. It completed the first pass claiming no issues were found. It got to 98% on the second pass and restarted my computer. The event log was empty. Red flag. I need to run it again to see if this happens a second time.
I ran a disk check of all drives, status was marked "OK"
Do you have any other tests I can run to hopefully narrow down the issue? After reinstalling Windows lightly and a second time fully, I'm pretty confident this is no longer an OS issue. I built this PC in 2021 and keep monitoring software open always so I haven't noticed any visible wear and tear or abnormal numbers. More than happy to provide logs as needed and whatnot. Right now I'm most suspicious that the RAM is the issue.
Thank you for reading.