I'm on an almost new installation of WINDOWS XP Professional that, for the first week or two, has worked fine.  Now, however, certain programs are randomly not opening or going non-responsive.  If I CLICK on any link or try to accept a download in MSN messenger, it goes non-responsive.  If I try to save a picture from the web to the computer in Firefox, it goes non-responsive.  Often times opening the control panel or the add/remove programs box will cause a freeze as well.  I have all updates installed except for SP2, because anytime I try to install SP2 it goes fine until the last part (where it says finalizing install/running finalizing processes) where it stops and goes no further and I am forced to do a manual restart and re-install all my drivers for the computer.  The most infuriating part is that the Task Manager will no longer open either, pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete results in the small box showing up in the systray implying that taskmanager opened, but it will not show up - usually forcing me to do a restart where it will tell me during the shut down sequence that taskmanager is non-responsive.  I even did a repair of Windows to see if that would fix the problem but to no avail.  Can anyone help with this? Any ideas as to what might have made it start doing this?
My sys specs are:
Athlon XP 2600+
Asus Mobo (nForce chipset
1.5 gigs of 3200 corsair ram (3x512mb)
GFORCE 6600gt 250mb agp 8x
maxtor 250gb HDDDo you have protection from viruses and Spyware?

[glb]Flame[/glb]I've heard that an unprotected computer connected to the internet now has a lifespan of mere minutes before infection occurs.yup,

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Is anyother process eating your cpu? Quote

I've heard that an unprotected computer connected to the internet now has a lifespan of mere minutes before infection occurs.