Xp freezing up

Searching for answers has not helped me. I have tried everything:
DELL Laptop Vostro 1500
XP Home edition
1.4 Mhz process
2 gig RAM
120 Gig HD
dedicated Video card
purpose of use
Graphics
digitizing embroidery designs for home embroidery machines
Website building and maintenance (mine)
email and browsing

Software is Janome Digitizer Pro
Fancy Works Suite
Corel Suite X3

protected by Avast home edition antivirus
PC Tools firewall

utililites
CCleaner
Ad Aware
Spot S & D

Uniblue Registry cleaner
and Speedup

started over a month ago with an occassional freeze up
mouse would not move and keypad is not responsive
have to hold down power key till it shuts down

will sometimes reboot right away but sometimes have to let it sit for up to an hour at times before I will come back on...the fan always comes back on when power is turned on, but the screen will remain black... bought a new Chiller for it but that made no diffence...then it will load normally...occassionaly it would freeze on load up...
ran the onboard system diagnostics yesterday...it froze the first time I tried it on the Mark B test... had to restart. Went all the way through the next time and through all the hard ware tests...took hours but all things got a pass

if I am in Outlook Express the program of choice for me and my email..it will do fine until I start to reply to emails... then freezes in the middle of the reply typing...then have to shut down and start again... appears to do better if I create a new mail instead of a reply...used to not do this.
Had it freeze while surfing last night and was playing and MSN video...
today was the first time I ever got a blue screen.. it said something about a WIN32 something... this was the first time and I had to shut down.. so I went and uploade the Windows LIVE as I was told this would update the Outlook... so I got that all set up and was in the program and it froze the first time I did a reply... I went into the control panel and check to see what had been updated because I was told the updates for my computer has been pretty heavy this last time...I wanted to uninstall a few and see if that helped it... but even though the update page says I have all the updates and none are hidden... the add/remove folder does not show ANY of the updates in the Windows section... bummer... so here I am not able to do much work on this thing for all the crashing... on Monday when it started all the frequent crashes...I put up with it for a few days then did a roll back to Sunday when things were more stable...this stopped the constant freezes on everything... now it is mainly the Outlook Express and occassional other times... what do I do now...I have scanned for viruses, the defininitions are updated daily...My firewall is blocking okay as I have it set to notify me when it blocks and attack... I did scan with all the spy ware removal tools and found a few not to be worried about files and removed them... Housecall only found some cookies... any suggestions?

thank you
:cry

 

I ran the hd drive diagnostic through the computer itself and the memory check, guess I need to check further... I have done the Malware thing...I am not a novice to Malware attacks... and I keep a close watch on that and check often...do not believe it to be Malware, but I will run all that again...you have given me something to go through, oh well back I go..to do somemore testing...and checking and all that fun stuff... thank you..

 

:hammer

Well now... here is what I have discovered... it is NOT my hardware, it is NOT malware or viruses... it is MICROSOFT!!!....

My computer was set to recieve and install all the updates automatically... my dumbness... the Internet 7 install is the culprit or one of the update son that... this has NO Outlook Express update on it (thus the problem with Outlook).....it is no longer part of it... instead you get Windows Live...which I kind of like and would like to hold on to... the freeze ups are pretty predictable now... SOMETIMES whe I reply to an email...not always... but ALWAYS when I try to SAVE AS a photo in an email or from a website... I belong to a yahoo sewing group and the test pictures are loaded for our use...I can email the picture to myself no problem..but I cannot save AS... it will freeze.. everytime... I have a photo editing program I love... Photo Expression...since the upgrade I can open the program, but if I try to edit a picture it freezes... so far these are the only problems I cannot solve... I do not know which particular upgrade or update caused the problem... I tried uninstalling the Photo Expression completely and then reinstalling it... didn't fix that problem...I believe that and the save as function are related to the same thing... so how do I find out which is the one to uninstall and can I keep Windows Live if I take off Internet 7...other then that , the system has settled down pretty much from the constant freezes...like it is learning to function again... is that possible?... okay back to work for me...thank you for any help I can get on this...