Windows 7 Professional New Folder / Start Menu

I just built my own PC (specs can be listed if requested). I just installed Windows 7 Professional and I seem to be uncovering more and more small errors/issues everytime I turn around. Here's a small list of some of the issues I've found thus far.

1.) No matter what folder I am in (or even on the desktop), when I try to create a new folder by right clicking and going to "New", it does not work. The next extension menu just says "Empty".

2.) My Start menu does not have any recently used programs on it and also does not maintain any item that I pin to it. Currently there exists only one item on it (internet explorer). Even when I remove that from the start menu and replace it with something/anything else (say Firefox), if I power down the system anything that was pinned there is removed and Internet Explorer returns (just IE, the rest of the menu for recently used/pinned programs is blank).

3.) When I open Firefox it asks me if I want to make it my default browser. I click yes, update my homepage, etc. When I open it again, it acts like I have never opened it before and asks again. The same happens for internet explorer. This happens everytime I shut down or restart my settings.. it's as if they aren't being saved and the computer thinks I haven't used them before.

4.) Windows hangs and random times doing random tasks.. or so it seems. I was downloading a file and it "hung". It didn't purely hang and make it so that I couldn't do anything at all. Mouse is still active, I can Alt+Ctrl+Delete, etc, but nothing can be ended and no windows disappear. Eventually the screen changes appearance to something comparable to setting the opacity to 50%. At this point I must hard reset and the system forces a disk check (which always turns out fine) upon restart.

That's just a short list of a few of the issues I've had so far. I thought maybe I could just try to re-update windows by going back to my earliest restore, however, it listed my earliest restore as being fairly recent and upon doing so yielded the same issues. I'm not sure if anyone knows if there is a way to set windows back to the original conditions that existed immediately upon installation, but if that is possible and someone could explain how to do it, I would like to give that a shot. Windows also only is listing 5 restore points. I would expect there to have been many more given the number of updates I have done today (since I just installed it earlier), is there a way to see more of these so I could go back even earlier? I saw a check box that said "Show additional restore points" or something along those lines, however, when clicked, no additional points were listed.I'm not sure what I did, but it isn't pretty and I would love if someone had an alternative to reformatting all of my harddrives and resinstalling windows.