After my computer has been on for about a few hours, it starts to lock up. Any music that is playing will freeze and only play very short bits every 30 seconds or so. Messenger programs also freeze up. Strangely enough, if I have Firefox running at the time, it isn't affected by the freeze at all.

I've scanned for viruses with two scanners (AVG and Avast! 4) with no findings. I checked if the system was overheating, it wasn't. Frankly, I'm just lost on the whole matter.

It could have something to do with a hardware failure of some sort, though I wouldn't know what exactly was failing. Firefox has the lowest memory footprint of all the programs, so perhaps the RAM is going out? I've never encountered a situation where that would die gradually though.



I'm running Windows XP Pro SP2. I've had to system restore a few times lately, so I'm going to reinstall the apps in question, and see if that helps at all.

Any other ideas?

I checked the event viewer, no errors whatsoever on that day the problem was most evident.

Also, I forgot to mention, but I have already used Spybot. Thanks for the idea though.

Well, I purposely triggered the error again to watch the CPU usage in the task manager. Once the music froze up, the CPU usage hovered around 4% and then the Task Manager froze.

Perhaps a list of hardware would be helpful:
Asus P5GPL-X Motherboard
Intel Celeron D 347 @ 3066 MHz
1024 MB PC 3200 RAM
XFX Nvidia Gefore 6600 256 MB PCI-e video card
Maxtor 100 GB Sata HDD
SoundMAX intergrated sound
(No USB devices are in use, and my keyboard and mouse are connected through PS/2)


All of the issues are recent. In the past, the error would simply be music and other sounds playing INCREDIBLY slowly. Reinstalling sound drivers would not resolve the problem, but a System Restore would.

In the meantime, I'll work on reinstalling the drivers like you suggested, could work this time, who knows?