Nvidia is probably the graphics card program that controls your monitor display settings.

You should be able to look in "System Information" and find what specific graphics card you're using. If it's not there, you can usually find enough description to work with in Control Panel | Hardware. You most likely will have an Nvidia card unless you paid enough buck$ for something extra-special that you'd know about it.

Most monitor settings can be made in Control Panel | Display, and with some monitors you can use buttons on the monitor to change things. The Nvidia process runs during machine operation to make things happen the way you told them to; and usually has a "control interface" that brings most of the common settings together in one place for changes. Usually if you have a graphics card beyond the bare minimum, you'll have an icon in the System Tray (at bottom right of the screen) to let you open the Nvidia process interface for changes.

WinXP has a whole bunch of "processes" that run during machine idle time. Disk cleanups, indexing, and such - all of which they tell us are good for you. Your AV should scan every new process that opens, and the scan on a new "idle process" that opens up "because the machine wasn't busy" can sometimes take a surprisingly long time and can make it look like the machine is hung up. The "idle process" itself might have closed when a new demand came along, but often the AV will insist on finishing its scan before it lets the process quit so that anything else can happen.

Sixty processes running sounds a little high, although 40 or so wouldn't be surprising. It's possible you have some malware that's using your computer without your permission. An AdAware plus Spybot scan - with current updates to signature files - should find anything unwanted. If both of those show you clean, then you may get some benefit from Start|Programs|Accessories|System Tools|Disk Cleanup and a defrag.

If you've converted from an older OS to a newer one, you may have neglected to update the drive format. Running WinXP or Win2K on a FAT16 drive works, but many of the maintenance functions will be a bit clumsy - and slow. Converting the drive to FAT32 will help some. If you're in WinXP, the NTFS format will be a lot more efficient - assuming you don't have some reason for keeping one of the older formats. It's also necessary to have sufficient free space on your hard drive to let the background processes have room to work. If you drive has less than 10% free, you can expect things to bog down.

John