Apologies in advance for this long post, but I like to be thorough. So to get right down to it, here are my laptops specs:
-I use a Lenovo Ideapad 585 laptop
-Processor- AMD E1-1500 APU with Radeon HD Graphics 1.48GHZ
-Ram- 4GB
-Operating System- the 64-bit version of Windows 8.1
I believe the whole issue stems from updating to windows 8.1. Had no issues for a few weeks after the update and then I had an issue with not being able to change the brightness on the screen. I installed the latest drivers; video, lenovo Energy Management, and a few windows driver packages from the lenovo website that fixed other peoples problems. One of those things did the trick and I could adjust my screens brightness.
Then the current issue started up, not being able to open certain programs. I've only found three so far: Windows Photo Preview program, AMD Control Catalyst Center, and Razer Synapse, but I imagine there are more. At this point I did a system restore to back before the screen brightness issue since I couldn't remember what I had done that might have started this issue, and that fixed opening those programs. But of course the screen brightness didn't work again a few days later.
I could go back to an older driver and that fixed the issue. Went from AMD Radeon HD 7130 Graphics to AMD Radeon HD 7130M and that fixed the screen brightness again. But back to square one on opening those programs a day later.