Thank you for the responses.

I am running it on a notebook. I did a clean install a few months ago.

I was thinking it might be hardware too but I doubt it...but then again the notebook is about 3yrs old.

I don't have extra RAM chips to try out. I was thinking of running extra tests on the hardware - any suggestions of good utils to use for testing? I have heard of Malware Bytes and will try that too.

System restore is turned off. I dont like to use it cos you get mem resident viruses. Running multiple profiles and created a new profile to see if anything changes and its the same in all profiles.

Any other ideas? Going to back up and try clean install again....it will prolly take away the problem but does explain what caused it and how to prevent it from happening again.