Explorer freezes after a couple of minutes

Hello all,

Ok, I've put the root of my problem down to a complete lack of knowledge combined with the use of systweak so here goes.

I've got XP on my Dell Inspiron and I've been using it now for about 3 years. I regularly keep disk backups of stuff and delete old items but with a fair few games and whatnot installed it all seemed to be going very slowly.

I'm a freelance writer and spend about 15 hours a day at this PC and I had bought a new desktop (a friend built it for me, and I made the mistake of having it. I constantly get fatal exception errors on that PC and tried to install XP OS in a bid to help but couldn't install it, I guess that's going to be a reformatting of the hard drive too if anyone can help. Sorry, I digress, that's a point for another thread sometime in the future).

So, I saw systweak and thought 'ooh, I'll give that a bash.' I didn't think I'd done anything particularly untoward but now when I'm using my PC I get a strange combination of problems. Firstly, explorer (windows not Internet) will work perfectly sometimes for a couple of minutes other times half an hour and then it will freeze. I can go on using whatever I have open and can even still save documents but I can't open new folders etc... and hovering over any of the desktop that is showing gives me the irritating hourglass. Other times I get booted off and given a (although I believe it's proper title is 'the') blue screen telling me windows has encountered a fatal problem and needs to shut down.

I know you guys always go on about hijack this, so below is my hijack this log (I notice a few 'file missing's in brackets, are any of these the problem?). I was supposed to be out buying a wireless router today but have spent most of the time trying to fix both PCs. Like I say, I've got all my important files and programs backed up so I even tried slapping my XP reload disk in but it tells me I have a newer version on the PC and so I can't even do that. I will seriously consider reformatting the hard drive if necessary and reinstalling XP from there but to be honest, I don't know how.

Could someone please give this frazzled writer a helping hand?

ADMIN: REMOVED IN LINE HIJACK THIS LOG FILE

 

Without going on too much about your hijack this log, I see a crack.com
in there and if that is any kind of hacking site you could have some
crap on your computer. First off do you run any of the following:
Antispyware?
Antivirus?
Firewall?
If so, which ones and how often do you scan?
If not, then it's possible that this is a spyware issue and you need to
post this in the spyware forum. In that forum you will see
a stickied thread near the top of the list that is a course of downloads
and scans to follow. There is quite a bit of stuff in there that will get
rid of all but the most stubborn of pests from your computer.

And I want to brace you for the worst here, just in case nobody else
thinks to mention it. If your computer is infected?
Then all those backup cd's are too. Nice huh? Yep, everytime you go to
load one of those back on your computer, you will need to run an
antivirus scan, and Adaware scan, and an antispyware scan.

Oh, and one other thing. You're not supposed to post those hijack this logs
on here without asking.

Oh and if you wanted, you could download Spybot S&D, Adaware SE, and Zonealarm firewall from this very site. If you ran scans with the first two,
it would give you a good indication as to whether you need to go ahead with
that stickied thread I mentioned.

 

Oh yeah, there is an actual download section to this site where
you can find practically everything.

 

Thanks, and sorry.

As far as I'm aware it's not from a crack site, although 3 people used to use this PC here. One being my 14 year old daughter.

I'll try all that out while considering myself severaly reprimanded.

 

Well I also noticed the poker links in there, and those are notorius
for putting adware and spyware on your computer.

 

Ah yeah, the poker is me. Thanks for the tips and the links I'm doing them all now... without missing out a single step.