You just mentioned an "HP App" so I am guessing you have a HP computer? In my work as an Oracle DBA the only servers we had issues wwith were ones made by HP. It seems they have 5 or 6 running Apps or processes and every time we had problems it was due to those background programs. One in particular would log onto HP looking for updates and such and would use 75% power or more for some reason? We used to disable any and all HP running Apps which never caused issues but did make the server run way better.

John, Yes, I have an HP computer. I'm not sure if it was an HP app or not. The screen had the HP label on it, but it looked like it might just have been a very basic low level screen ie nothing was running. It had the 'circle' of spiralling balls going around on it, which I think is MS doing its thing.

I've been playing around some, took the side cover off and vac'd out the computer, removed the heat sink/fan from the cpu and cleaned it, cleaned the heat sink on the video card too.
On booting up after that I got a message that said Windows didn't load correctly what did I want to do. Got all the way into refreshing but backed down at the last screen.
How do I go about reloading Windows from the recovery portion of my HD?
It says it won't mess with my files.
OK, I'm good with that.
Does that mean it will just re-load Windows from that partition onto the 'main' partition?
When looking at device manager(?) I saw that HP Assistant takes up a lot of CPU time/space. I thought I'd disabled that a long time ago. Guess not.

Did ya try banging on it really hard?
Sometimes that helps ;)

Numerous times sammy, numerous times.

Did a little digging on the interwebs and came up with a possible fix. I've changed the power handling characteristics and set them to where the computer never shuts off the hard drive when going into sleep mode. So far that has worked OK.
I also usually will tell the computer to go to sleep via the start up button on the task bar, the one that gives the options of shutting down, sleep, restart, and what I've found is, using that, the hard drive shuts off. I've done it twice that way and it's started up both times. Just trying to update this in case someone is interested/has the same problem.

I also used to have "Broken registry items error". So I googled and here is what I have found out https://www.devicetricks.com/fix-broken-registry-items/ . Broken registry items are usually from software that has been uninstalled, but the uninstaller didn't remove completely. Most uninstallers do not do a good job of completely cleaning things up.

I have a similar problem with my Desktop running Windows 10. But a lot of the time the desktop is "frozen". Try right clicking on the desktop. That seems to wake it up.

I just never let it go into 'sleep' mode any more, James. Seems to work fine doing that. Sometimes I put it to sleep deliberately and it'll wake up just fine. Other times not, so it never sleeps much.
Now, sometimes in the morning if it's been really cool at night, it doesn't boot up, just has a blue then white then red(?) screen flashing. When it does that I just kill the power and push the button again. If it doesn't start after that, rinse and repeat.
What can I say?
Chrsitmas is coming soon so I may treat myself to a new computer this year.

The HD might be worn out.
If not, at least you will have another fresh hardware backup of the data and OS.

There are some various disk imaging/cloning/migration software out there.

I had no luck after purchasing a separate $55, one-use-only, internet-required, Acronis disk in a box.
What a waste.
I previously cloned a HD with included free Acronis software and it worked perfectly.
Things must have changed.

No experience, but one HD manufacturer looks like they include this software with their new HD.
https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/tools/


(edit: Platter drive to SSD requires a little extra tweaking to make it work. IDK. Above my skill set.)

To prevent any sleeping/wakeup issues I set both the computer and my 40 inch flat screen monitor to NEVER to go sleep. At night when done and no over night movie creations or stuff I will just press the "FN" key + "F11" and the ASUS motherboard goes right to sleep, shutting off video, hard drives, ETC. I also then just turn off the monitor with the remote.

As for what HP services, Apps, Processes, ETC are running, startup the Task Manager and look for everything that starts with the letters "HP" and disable them. If not sure, do a quick web search to see what they are.

It only had 3 HP things running when I checked it just now. All disabled now but I haven't tried to put it to sleep yet.