OK, I'm warming up to XP now. I found that by watching the Processes list in the Task Manager, I could see in real time exactly what program or file was stealing all my CPU power and making my system choke (and frequently go poof and reboot itself while I was doing something).

Turned out to be something called dllhost.exe -- a quick Google search revealed that I had a variant of the Blaster worm, aka Welchia. I could temporarily solve the problem just by ending that process, then going through the steps to remove the offending files and fix the registry...(btw dllhost.exe is a legitimate Windows file, don't delete all of them, but this worm puts it in the wrong place and uses it for evil purposes--if it's in c:\windows\system32\wins accompanied by svchost.exe, then the worm put it there--it should only be in the system folder itself. )

It's not blazingly fast, i still need that memory upgrade, but it's way better--hasn't crashed or choked once since I gave it the gears.

W-O