My computer has been acting strangely lately and I was wondering if any of the fine folks here be able to help me.

A couple weeks ago I started receiving lots of "this program has performed and illegal action and has been shut down" messages that, upon clicking "ok" will reset my desktop, removing several icons from my start-up tray. Recently it has been getting worse, where two of these messages will pop up simultaneosly. When I click "ok" on both of them, it obviously closes down Explorer, since it will neither show it as running in my program manager, or allow me to click on anything. It's not locked up, since certain windows will pop up if you use the proper keyboard shortcuts. I use the combination of Ctrl-Alt-Delete to close out annoying pop-ups, and it seems that the double illegal function windows always follow this. I have been using this particular keyboard shortcut for a while now, and has cause me not problems till now.

Another problem that has reared it's ugly head of late has to do with my internet connection itself. At times I will be surfing (often on Mudcar) and when I refresh, none of the pictures on the site show up, only empty boxes with little red x's in the corner. If you hit refresh again, it tells me that the page cannot be connected to. I try connecting to other sites but I get error messages on those to. My connection info says I'm connected, but is not sending or receiving any information. If I disconnect and try to reconnect, it does it fine, but once connected, it will refuse to open any webpage. I have tried sometimes as long as 2 hours to get ANY page to open, all in vain. YET, when I shut down the computer and restart, and connect, pages open fine. But I always have this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that it will stop receiving again. And I am usually right. The fact that upon restarting the computer, everything works as it should again leads me to believe it is not a problem with my ISP's server, since, when hooked up to my ISP's other server in a different town (with different dial-up numbers), it happened there too.

Is this just too mysterious? Can anyone help? Or am I doomed to be a prisoner of my evil computer?