On a fully updated Win7 x64, every so often the system stalls for a minute or so. This has been going on for a couple months now. By stalling I mean the mouse responds and I can move windows around, but any window, any program, that is open becomes whiteish when I select it AND any new programs will not open. It doesn't matter what kind of program it is. When the stall stops all clicks I made (open new programs for example) take effect.

Nothing shows up consistently (as in every time this happens) in the event log. Today though I was able to find something, but it doesn't reveal much other than the "system was unresponsive". It's a 7009 for "A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the Windows Error Reporting Service service to connect."

It doesn't matter if I have any USB devices plug-in or not. I've ran Microsoft Security Essentials and Malwarebytes.

While the machine is unresponsive, I've noticed that Drive D (the other partition on the single internal HD in this laptop) is displayed like this in explorer. This never occurs with Drive C or any other drive on the machine. .

SMART report for the physical drive:

Read benchmark by HD Tune 5 Pro, probably the most telling piece of the puzzle. Isn't this alone enough to see there is a problem with the drive, regardless of whether the unresponsiveness is caused by such purported problem?

Here is a short hardware report:

Computer:      LENOVO ThinkPad T520
CPU:           Intel Core i5-2520M (Sandy Bridge-MB SV, J1)
               2500 MHz (25.00x100.0) @ 797 MHz (8.00x99.7)
Motherboard:   LENOVO 423946U
Chipset:       Intel QM67 (Cougar Point) [B3]
Memory:        8192 MBytes @ 664 MHz, 9.0-9-9-24
               - 4096 MB PC10600 DDR3 SDRAM - Samsung M471B5273CH0-CH9
               - 4096 MB PC10600 DDR3 SDRAM - Patriot Memory (PDP Systems) PSD34G13332S
Graphics:      Intel Sandy Bridge-MB GT2+ - Integrated Graphics Controller [D2/J1/Q0] [Lenovo]
               Intel HD Graphics 3000 (Sandy Bridge GT2+), 3937912 KB 
Drive:         ST320LT007, 312.6 GB, Serial ATA 3Gb/s
Sound:         Intel Cougar Point PCH - High Definition Audio Controller [B2]
Network:       Intel 82579LM (Lewisville) Gigabit Ethernet Controller
Network:       Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205 AGN 2x2 HMC
OS:            Microsoft Windows 7 Professional (x64) Build 7601

The drive less than 1 year old. Do I have a defective drive? Seagate Tools diag says there is nothing wrong with the drive...

UPDATE: I noticed that the windows error reporting service entered the running state then the stopped state and the space between the two events was exactly 2 minutes. Which error it was trying to report I don't know. I check the "Reliability Monitor" and it shows no errors to be reported. I've disabled the windows error reporting service to see if the problem stops.