Does a corrupted WMI mean a very slow PC?

[GTS]

Hi was looking at a PC for a friend -almost new HP Pavillion.
Trouble is it is so slow that it is almost impossible to actually do
anything to diagnose - I mean five minutes to open an application. However I
did manage to confirm no spyware or virus, and the CPU usage is almost nil.
The syptom is really an incredibly slow hard drive. UDMA is enabled, no
SMART errors reported in Everest, drive does not need defrag, no errors
found.
The one obvious thing is that you cannot get into System Information as 'WMI
is corrupted', and cannot get into System Restore.
So can WMI corrupted cause this VERY SLOOOOW behaviour?
TIA
Graham

 

[Scott McNairy \(MVP\)]

Perhaps, sometimes a virus may be the underlying cause but WMI can become
corrupted in other ways.

See this link here for some troubleshooting information:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/resources/wmifaq.mspx#EHAA