one problem or many?

[caveman]

Hi everyone. I've used these boards before and found them very helpful. I'm hoping you can help again. I am running windown XP sp. 3. Using AMD Athlon XP 1800+, 1.53 GHz; 480 MB RAM. I went away for a year and left my computer to the devices of my significant other, who knows little (less than me) about computers. I tried to troubleshoot/problem solve over the phone when necessary. I'm home and have been having several different problems with the computer.

First, it is often deadly slow, and seems busy (but not always). It barely seems able to function. It is usually impossible to do two things at once. Simple things, like download and open an email, and opening Minesweeper while downloading.

Second, when I open an application, the computer sometimes says I have 38 copies open. Indeed, when I close the one I'm in, I close the others one by one.

I have limited what opens on startup. I've run multiple virus, spybot, malware programs.

I was using AVG for awhile, but it just wasn't running correctly (I can't tell you now what was wrong, but I knew it wasn't downlaoding new virus definitions, because I kept getting an error message). There was no direction on what to do, or where to check to fix the problem. I then tried a virus program from COMODO, but the computer just couldn't seem to run at all. I don't know if COMODO was doing something in the background, but the computer often seems frozen for long periods (literally impossible to open a window) of time and seems busy. I broke down and bought a program called CyberDefender, which seems to be less invasive, but the problems remain. I had/have the virus software set to run in the early morning hours, so it shouldn't be interfering with other stuff. I am also running COMODO BOClean and spybot. I didn't think these were duplicate applications, but maybe they are.

In terms of memory usage, I have 66.8 GB free.

Any ideas, suggestions? I'm not particularly computer savvy, but try to work things out and have usually been successful until now.

Thanks for any help.

[catgate]

First thing to do is close down all programmes and items running in the back ground (sys.tray ) and run defrag.

Then download Crap Cleaner and run that. http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/ (it's freeware).

After that go onto http://housecall.trendmicro.com/uk/ and run their online "Housecall".

Following that try your system again and report back.

By then others, with more intimate knowledge of Xp than I have, will no doubt have looked in and will have more specific items.

[rong]

I think I would run the defrag last.