Windows disappearing temporarily

For the last few weeks, I've been encountering a problem I have never seen before. At least once a day (sometimes once every other day), Windows is disappearing. For example, I'll have a folder open and working on it, and then the taskbar and the desktop icons just disappear off screen. If I have a program like AIM or Windows Media Player open, they remain, but the taskbar and icons don't. When they do reappear (usually 2-3 seconds after disappearing), the folder that had been open is now closed. I've done all the virus, adware and spyware scans, and all have come up clean. My computer is 3 years old, and just had a new motherboard installed this past November. It has the following specs:

Windows XP Service Pack 1
256 MB System Memory
20 GB Hard Drive

Can anyone help?

 

welcome to the forums!

first of all, you can try updating to service pack 2. it's a start of a shot. who knows, maybe it'll fix things.

hrm... try going to the task manager (ctrl + shift + esc on the keyboard) and go to processes. now look for explorer.exe on the list of processses running. tell us what percentage of cpu it's using. just a hunch. basically, explorer.exe (the main ui core of windows) is crashing and starting up again. it could be due to one of many causes of this problem, but i'm just focusing on one for now.

 

Thank you for the welcome

Explorer.exe is using 16,016k as of right now.