When I boot my computer, I get a padlock icon on the taskbar that says "Cannot connect to a Windows Service." I cannot hover over it or click the icon, else it disappear. In a possibly related or unrelated issue, I cannot use any of the Microsoft Office Suite, the programs all open, but become unresponsive after I make an edit to a document. Any help would be appreciated as I anticipate the upgrade of Win10.

Are you still experiencing the "Cannot connect to a Windows Service" error message? Have you updated to Windows 10 yet?

There are a few troubleshooting steps that we can perform to try and resolve this problem if you are still having this problem. One problem could be with a corrupt winsock connection. Another could be an issue with access rights and another possibility could be a corrupt user account. We can also check the System Event Notification Service service as well.

1. Verify that you have administrative rights with your account. If you don't, setup your account with the rights. If you do have admin rights, I would suggest creating a new user with admin rights then restart the computer and log in with the new credentials.

2. To reset the winsock connection, perform the following:

a. right-click the Start button on the Desktop.

b. select Command Prompt (admin)

c. type netsh (enter)

d. type winsock reset (enter)

e. restart computer.