I have realised this has been discussed before after using the search, but there issues weren't identical to mine, and there fixes do not apply to me. Anyway, thanks in advance for any help you can offer! Basicaly, I was away from my PC for 2 hours yesterday, came back to discover my once fully functional PC had gone quirky: I tried loading an application, Noteworthy Composer (very "windows like"), and basically it crashed at every turn: like when opening a file using File -> Open, or any another accessible feature. Thought it was corrupt, uninstalled it, then when I tried to install it again the Setup Window wouldn't display - . Restarted the PC hoping for a fix... then I got some freaky network activity. This is a copy of the Applications and what they were doing (from Sygate Firewall which noticed them): http://www.geocities.com/ninja_kirb/activity_info.txt I uploaded it because it would look a friggin mess in this post copied and pasted, hope that's alright regarding forum rules. So, wth? I checked what they were doing, and after running a WhoIs on the IP's, they turned out to be reasonably safe: Internet Assigned Numbers Authority - 239.255.255.250 Asia Pacific Network Information Centre - 219.133.240.17 Apparently these guys deal with RIR's, something about all the IP Addresses in the world being assigned to Certain ISPS's and large organisations? *shrugs* Long story short now, even if I let this data send OR not, I can't access certain websites in IE6 (Yes, Firefox works perfectly fine), and the odd program on my machine wont load. Infact, I cant install this friggin Noteworthy Composer back because the Install window doesn't appear. Furthermore, it takes about 5 minutes to get MSN to respond to my "Maximize from the system tray" command, let alone logging in. PLUS Excel and Access crash on loading, just the "error sound", nothing more. I mean, I know this seems like a large ramble, but it's one of these computer problems you get every so often, which make ABSOLUTELY *NO* sense, seriously... it's quite ridiculous. I like to think I'm computer literate, but this is just screwed up. Did I mention Explorer.exe isn't listed in my List of processes btw? ? I thought that was always in there - and starting the process manually via File -> New Task doesn't work, it literally opens a File Explorer instead. So yeah, thanks for reading, maybe someone can enlighten me with a fix >_< Btw, I run Ad-Aware for any rubbish, didn't find anything, and well... don't suggest a Virus Scanner, they won't run - I use a web based one through Trend, which wont load on either Firefox or IE6, and despite I have AVG installed and it has a virus vault, I can't seem to run a Virus scan with it!

Wow... XP seriously shouldn't be mocked, once again it prevails! I attempted a System Restore, my latest one was from 2 days ago... and it's fixed it... Doe this mean my problem was a Windows one? What on Earth did I do?! I would love to know so I can avoid this problem in the future! Thanks for reading my ramble though ^_^;;

Start cleaning you machine. Remove all the programs that you don't need the run msconfig and disable all the items in the startup. Reboot and see if you it's as quirky as it was before.