Fresh install XP Pro problems....

First post in a while....God I wish I could change my username.Thats what you get when you sign up too fast.
Anyway....I have just done my second fresh install in 2 days(lets get this out of the way....athlon 1600+,1.40g,376mb ram...xp pro).
Of course this was a last resort.i did the prerequisite barrage of anti-virus,malware ,spyware...every friggin'scan you could think of(actually...just like your listing come to think of it)I came up with nothing.Maybe an stray piece of adware of something.I did chkdsk /r,and I ran the maxtor powermax utility which is a quick(sector by sector) test,advanced test,burn in test,and finally a zero fill ,.full format.Then I re installed xp pro.Should be good as new right?No way,it started freezing up within an hour,and all i had installed was xp,opera,advanced uninstaller and tune up utilities.Just for the hell of it I ran a registry scan and came up with about 80 errors.So I ran thru the same exact bullshit as before and re installed xp...this time withiut sp2 to see if maybe that had something to do with the problem.I didn't install Opera either.Again it froze up! I did another reg scan and again there were about 80 errors!
Does anybody have any ideas as to what could be causing this to happen?

I'm really at my wits end right about now.In a way I'm lucky because I just had surgery on both arms and I'm out of work for quite a while.So I've got time to devote to this.But It's driving me nuts as well.

I would be grateful for any assistance.

 

I would start by removing every peice of hardware except the RAM, video card, hard, drive and CD-ROM. Take out any NIC, sound card, USB/Firewire card, everything but whats absolutely necessary to boot a system. Do a fresh install (reformat first) and run it "bare bones" for a little while. Then slowly add a peripheral or program, one at a time. This way hopefully you can weed out which program or hardware is causing the problems.

If after the "bare bones" fresh install, you're still having problems, suspect the RAM or motherboard.


-Steve