I've been using Chrome for about a month now and it is great for slower sites like this one and e-bay. It does take some getting used like scamp said. Seems allot of things are set up backwards compared to IE and it doesn't have as many buttons as IE so in a sense it's simpler but I've found myself having a hard time finding stuff I used to be able to find easily on IE.
64cuda it sounds like to me your system is all screwed up possibly due to a virus or trojan and needs re-formatted. That's probably the only fix since so much stuff is missing and corrupted. BTW: Don't think that no virus can't get through Norton. It's not infallibale by a long shot. I've had 3 get past my Norton. Luckily I was able to remove them without re-formatting.