Random frozen taskbar

I can't find anything similar to this on the forum. My taskbar freezes from time to time. If I open task manager with Ctrl/Alt/Del, it shows no processes active ( System Idle Process 99%) and there is no hard drive activity. It unfreezes after between 1 & 3 minutes and all the icons I have tried open together. The windows shortcuts all work OK. I have Win XP home + SP3. and a wired Linksys ADSL 2 Gateway.I have done a full virus scan with Comodo Internet security, scanned with Malwarebytes and run CCleaner.

 

Thanks I'll give it a try but it only happens occasionally and I haven't been able to 'put my finger' on any action that may cause it so I'd need to leave it running in safe mode for some time.

 

It appears OK in safe mode. I run an online weather station from this PC and I ran that in safe mode with networking. All OK. I noticed that a lot less processes run in safe mode. One, perhaps related, problem is with one of the svchost.exe's of which there are 8 running.
I'm well out of my comfort zone here so I hope this makes sense. I get a report in the active connections window of Comodo that svchost TCPout Source ***.***.1.64.1150, Destination ***.***.1.1.2869 66bytes in, 66bytes out. I know the first address is my PC and the ***,***'s are the same. Is the second address my router? This continues for some time with the '1150' increasing by one each time. I am able to close that connection with no apparent problems.