Crash in Gmax/3D Studio Max

I've owned both of these before, and I even bought the 3dsmax. I've even used them on this computer before. Now I open up my old model archive and being playing wc3 when I've recently become VERY interested in map making. Here's my bizarre problem:

In Gmax and 3dsmax, everytime I click on an item from ANY menu at the top of the screen, it freezes severely. Once in a long while, roughly 15+ minutes, gmax will unfreeze, but freeze up once again after clicking something from one of the menus. I ran gmax just fine, clicked file, import. It froze. Tried restarting it and clicking File, Open. Froze. I tried everything in the file menu, even exit, they all freeze. In windows task manager under CPU it says 99%, yet everything else still runs fine, but the menu from gmax will be on top of everything either until it unfreezes or I close it. I thought this was limited to gmax until I re-installed 3dsmax and noticed it does the EXACT same thing. I tried Maya, Wings 3d, milkshape.. none of them give me the same problem. Does anyone have any idea what this could be??? I REALLY need help so I can convert all of these models to WC3 format.

what I would do, is back up all your stuff, and reformat. I figured out that's usually the best way of getting rid of your problems

Well with all of my Hard-Drives nearly full and no room to back-up stuff... sounds impossible to me. Besides, I've tried it before and never got any decent results out of it. Does anyone know what could possible cause a crash when clicking an option out of ANY of the menus (file, edit, animation, help.. etc.), but no crashes occur when doing anything else.