I had a similar problem that would cause me to reformat and reinstall Windows three times and every time I booted the fresh install for the first time the problem would return. I kept on believeing that my hardware was going bad, but I found out that it was not. My problem lyed in a corrupt partition, so no matter how many times I would delete or reformat it would come back. Because I have Three Hard Drives and Four Partitions: My C drive I kept deleting the partition and reinstalling and after the third time I found out the problem was on my secondary 5400 rpm drive that I use to store my downloads. Luckliy for me that was the drive with the two partitions, one 39GB and the other was a 1GB partition I used for swapfile. It was the smaller one that was corrupt and was causing Windows explorer to come to a crawl. To remidy the problem I used Windows disk managment to remove the logical drive then repartition and reformat. After my reboot all was better.
Second problem it could be is AMD's Cool and Quiet. I would recomend removing all Cool and Quiet drivers, next I would shut the PC down and Disable Cool and Quiet in the bios.
Third if those fail I will recomend a last resort: Go back to an older Bios Version, the one that predates the Dual Core support. What should happen is the Bios will only reconise just one of the two cores. There have been reports of some games not playing well with Dual Core processors this might help fix the problem untill a Patch from Microsoft or your Motherboard/Game maker can offer you a fix.
Fourth if you can borrow a friends single core CPU I would recomend trying that before you try the BIOS trick.