Itunes? Adobe? Google? My computer has slowed to a crawl

Good Afternoon, y'all.

I'm at my wit's end. Since installing I-Tunes my computer is ridiculously slow. Even before that, it had slowed considerably for no apparent reason. I believe the culprits are the Google Toolbar stuffs, Adobe's constant need to update, and I-Tunes perceived need to run a bunch of stuff in the background.

I'm running XP Pro SP3. I've run malwarebytes, rkill, combofix. I've uninstalled google toolbar a dozen times and it keeps showing up. I disabled it in msconfig and it reappears. I've disabled it in add-ons and yet there it is. I've turned off automatic updates in every piece of software that I can find an option to do so.

I've groveled in supplication to the computer gods.

At the moment, my opinion is that Google, I-Tunes and Adobe are pert near needing to be classified as malware.

Any ideas? Accessing and cruising the web is so bad that I'm catapulted back in time to the days of 4800 baud modems and dialup. Opening local files is slow and trying to open files on the network is even worse.

Connie (pulling out her hair and cursing a lot)

 

i would try cleaning it out with the disk cleaner or a program called ccleaner which also fixes registry entries and is a way to uninstall programs if the windows uninstaller doesn't cooperate. also download a free anti-virus program like avast (i reccomend that one) register and do a thorough boot-time scan. and open up a command prompt (start>accessories>command prompt or go to start>run and type in cmd) and type in chkdsk f, this will repair any corrupted files

if all fails, uninstall some stuff you don't use or don't want

 

I did run ccleaner as well as regseeker. I'm running Norton antivirus but will give Avast a go at it. I didn't think to do chkdsk, but I will. Unfortunately, I've uninstalled everything I can.

As much as I like my I-phone, I hate I-Tunes. I'd much rather just run it on demand. If the other suggestions don't help, I'm just going to uninstall ITunes and reinstall as needed (with an immediate uninstall).

OOPS! Edited to add sincere thanks to Barononeefdip!

 

I'd replace adobe with: (one of these)

Foxit http://majorgeeks.com/Foxit_Reader_d4763.html
Sumatra http://majorgeeks.com/Sumatra_PDF_d5622.html
PDF-XChange Viewer http://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-viewer

Rid everything google related:
http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=9231

 

Thank you, thank you! I can't get rid of Adobe because I'm using Creative Suite for web design, etc. At present, I can't justify dumping CS and buying something else. (Sigh)

But the google info is greatly appreciated. The url was quite helpful and at the moment it appears Google is gone.

I still think Itunes is the greatest part of the problem and I'm not a happy camper that it needs to run all the time. I've uninstalled it and while things are still slow, they're much faster than they were.