My mate I go to dinner with just called me, he's at a guy's place, and when he right clicks on a folder, it doesn't do anything, and then explorer says "not responding" in the task list.

We went through all the startup items in msconfig. My god, the list must have had a scroll bar slider about 1 pixel wide, because there was about 400 things listed in as starting up.

Every piece of spyware, porn diallers, everything. We went through, and I told him all the things to get rid of, and he rebooted.

I got off the phone at that point, so I don't know if it fixed the problem, but my god, I'm surprised the machine worked at all, with that much crap running on it.