Desktop goes crazy, please advise

I am running Windows XP and started having this problem a couple of months ago but it keeps getting worse.

When I close out of a program, the icons appear and the program that was closed looks like it just pushes to the background. The program is closed - it looks almost like I did a screen shot and set it as my background. Then every time I open and close a different program, it looks like just layers of these closed programs. Today I closed out of my email, the icons moved forward onto my outlook background. Then I ran adaware and closed it, there remained the pop up box for adaware even though the program was closed, layered on top of my email that had been closed earlier.

When I reboot, it hangs up on a soft boot so I have to do a hard boot on it. Then everything comes back on line just fine.

Haven't ever seen it before. Any suggestions, would be greatly appreciated.