slow pc/blue screen

hello -

yesterday i was working on my pc all day without issue. i stepped away for a meeting and went back to close everything out and shut the pc down afterwards and ie locked up on me. i went into the task manager and killed the process which took much longer than it usually would and after doing that my pc started running very very slowly. i rebooted and left for the day thinking nothing of it and came in today to the same extremely slow computer. i uninstalled a few apps and rebooted and got my first blue screen with the following error....

A DEVICE DRIVER ATTEMPTING TO CORRUPT THE SYSTEM HAS BEEN CAUGHT. THE FAULTY DRIVER CURRENTLY ON THE KERNEL STACK MUST BE REPLACED WITH A WORKING VERSION.

TECH INFO:
STOP: 0x000000c4, PARA1 00000060, PARA2 00000000, PARA3 0000259c, PARA4 00000003.

nothing has been changed or recently updated on the pc. i've done absolutely nothing so i'm not sure how a device driver could now be affecting my pc. i looked in the sys log and found the following error....

the device, \device\ide\ideport1, did not respond within the timeout period

i also found an ATAPI error which i don't have handy at the moment but i know that references my cd drive. i've swapped out the cd drive and that didn't fix the issue. i then took the cd drive out of the loop completely so it was just my hdd and that didn't fix the issue either.

this particular ide port is my hdd(the error listed above). i have my hdd on one channel setup as cable select and a cd drive on the other channel setup the same. this is the same configuration they've been in for a couple of years. like i said, i've made no changes recently.


i'm at a total loss. the pc is a dell optiplex gx270. i have been running all of the dell utilities and everything checks out ok which cancels out my original thought that it was my motherboard going bad. now i'm thinking the original error that referenced the device driver attempting to corrupt the system is what i need to focus on but that is where my inexperience comes into play. if there is anyone out there that agrees with where i'm at in my thinking and can point me in the right direction i'd be much appreciative. any other feedback would be appreciated too.

thank you