Helping someone out on their Win 7 64 bit.

It boots at a fairly normal speed, but apps take way forever to load. Like ten minutes to launch Firefox. Or a few minutes to open an Explorer WINDOW. Additionally, the little hard DRIVE light seems to never stop spinning.

Safe mode launches and runs super-fast and normal.

Ad Aware and Malware Bytes have found nothing.

I have disabled *censored* near everything in Startup and Services in MSCONFIG and have uninstalled a ton of STUFF, and still, no...

What do I need to look for?

First, what is the model of your Computer.
Is it a home built?
Desktop? Laptop?
Do you also have the 32 bit version of  Windows 7 on another hard drive?
If so, that would help with diagnostics by substitution.

It's a Compaq presario cq60 laptop about four or five years old. Don't think THERES a 32 bit on here... How would I know?Implore my remark about a 32 bit version.

Cam you isolate the problem?
You said it does  perform better in safe mode.
You say apps take long to load.
Have you done a check disk recently?

Run Check Disk from the Command Line to Find and Fix Errors. You can run Check Disk from the command line or within other utilities. At a command prompt, you can test the integrity of the E drive by typing the following command: chkdsk E:
Or for the main drive: chkdsk C:
If this takes a long time, you may have some issues with eh hard drive.
(On my PC it can take over a minute.  )