Xp home stops responding when I right click

I bought a new dell 8400 last month. 3.5ghz p4, 230gig hard drive, nvidia 6800 with 2gigs of ram using Windows XP Home.

It was working grand for the first two weeks but in the last two weeks something has happened that I haven't a clue how to solve.


Whenever I boot up my machine if I right-click on any file on my desktop (or anywhere else for that fact) the pc becomes really slow and stops responding. I then have to close the file through ctrl + alt+ del. If I go into my documents where I have stored my music collection and if I click an album to play, windows media player stops responding before it has even played a song, and I must ctrl + alt+ del them and close windows media player and the album folder through task manager because both are not responding.

Also, the only way I can delete files is if I drag them into the recycle bin otherwise my pc becomes really slow and stops responding.

Usually I get the message 'drwatson postmortem debugger has encountered an error and must close'

This happens a few times each day, which is bloody frustrating. This never happened on my older p3 800mhz, 256mb ram using Windows Xp Home.

Also transfering files through usb2 has become maybe 10 times slower than usual.

If its of any help I can play half life 2 with no slowdown using the highest possible game specs. I have used 115gigs of my 230 gig harddrive too.

I've run a few virus checks and nothing was found.

I really appreciate your help because I'm baffled.


Thanks a million

mick

wow you spent a lot more than what you should have on that pc (mine was $1300 anyways) if you dont have it already get SP2, ad-aware from lavasoft.com, and try seeing if that works out

and what anit-viral are you using (plz let it be avg anti-virus)

on the plus side you can still play HL2

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You registered for QuakeCon on April 30, 2008, 6:56 pm. You were # 366 to sign up for QuakeCon!

thanks for replying.

Well the machine cost me nothing because its a business machine - used for doing work at home.

The machine is less than a month old, it came with service pack 2 installed on it. I just downloaded ad-adware and avg anti-virus and both found nothing. I also downloaded the updates for both programs and it still found nothing. I'm still having the same problems with my machine.

I'd be incredibly greateful if anyone can shed some light on what might be causing it.

I have a little program which tells me how much ram is free on my system. Out of 2048 mb of ram I have on my machine, when I start up only 1650mb is free. Task manager says 43 processes are running on start up.


Thanks

btw goober, its a dell dimension 8400, it didn't cost 8400 is that what you thought?

43 processes! that's not right! gotta be some you can disable, that would help a lot!

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The cpu usage on start up is 2%. It was about the 43 processes number when I got the machine and I haven't installed much since I got the machine. I haven't a clue what most of the processes are

what would be the average number of processes on start up?

freebees are good and no 8400 is not what i thought you paid, i went to the dell refurbished pages (means there parts taken from other pc, items/open boxes) and it was about 2g's $.

and i have 51 processes going, and i can still up it more if i want msn in and other crap like that going

get the 'highjackthis' from the tools section and run it, then post the results, maybe then we'll unearth your problems

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You registered for QuakeCon on April 30, 2008, 6:56 pm. You were # 366 to sign up for QuakeCon!

Thanks guys, heres the hijack this scan results

well one thing i noticed is that, that you have mcafee, & avg, & ms anti-virus, and all 3 programs running at once can slow down your system.

you can disable some of those processes by going into 'msconfig' click start, run, type in msconfig, go to the startup tab and de-check some of those processes.

im not an expert on the 'highjackthis' stuff, but i didnt find nuttin, but i miss some stuff every now and then.

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You registered for QuakeCon on April 30, 2008, 6:56 pm. You were # 366 to sign up for QuakeCon!

I don't mean to sound like a retard but what are the actually names of what I should be de-checking? Because some of them look pretty similar and I don't want to deselect something important.

Thanks

Michael


EDIT/

I closed all three of those progams and my pc is still running slow, and if I right-click any file on my destop, or try to play an album by pressing the play all button, it stop responding and I have to close the non-responding files or restart the pc through task manager.