HELP! Generic Host error shutdown

i keep getting an error window that says generic host has encountered a problem and must close now. this shuts down my dial up internet connection and i have to restart the computer in order to get back online. at one point i was able to get it to tell me it was error 128. i searched ms for that but got some odbc clock nonsense (well, just nonsense to me because i am not that computer literate). I am running windows xp on a toshiba satellite 1005-s157 that is approximately 5 years old. this just started happening about 10 days ago. i set restore back to november 1 to no avail. i did have ev1 isp service which was supposed to be switching over to peoplepc but i never got their download and, after dealing with their customer noservice department for six days, i ended up just switching to basicisp for my connection. any help would be greatly appreciated.