Anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours after starting my computer, it begins to act up, and I can't open the "My computer" folder. I can access any folder on the computer, and navigate between folders using shortcuts, etc, as long as I don't open "My computer". Another side effect is that I cannot shut down or restart the computer... it freezes BEFORE it even gets a chance to say "Shutting down your computer". During the first 30 minutes or so of using my computer, I have no trouble opening "My computer" OR shutting down or restarting. It's not prudent to shut down my computer every thirty minutes, is there anything that can be done about this? I had a problem similar to this a while back, only it would happen 100% of the time, regardless of how long my computer was on, but I fixed it by messing with my Intel IDE controllers and fixing up the registry. Now my computer has worked fine for at least 4 months, until this odd variation of the problem rose up out of nowhere. @_@ Any suggestions on how to combat this? I don't believe it's a heating problem, otherwise it wouldn't go away when I reset my computer.

Do you have any utilities or programs running while you turn on the computer? What are they? You may want to try and disable or uninstall some of them. See if this helps, let us know if it doesn't :)

Let's see, I have systray and explorer... and three other things: Getright, and two things that I have no clue about what they do called Robot and Imgicon. Even if I disable all these programs after startup, the problem still happens... so it's probably not that. I'm curious as to what else it might be, though...

My computer holds references to HDD, FDD, CD, Printers, Dialup Networking etc.. It would appears to me that either one of those references are no longer valid, but as the reference is still there, windows kept trying to search for the reference and checking to see if the hardware is still available, thus "freezed" up. My first reaction would be to go to the Control Panel, System, Device Manager, remove all the reference to HDD, CD etc.. including the Intel IDE Bus Mastering driver (fifo stuffs), reboot and let the system re-install the devices for you to see if it would improve the situation. If on the reinstall it ask for IDE drive, just let it look into the windows/system where the original drive is.

Sounds like your fan on your cpu is dead or not spinning fast enough. Over heated CPUs will lock a computer up. Won't hurt to check! A easy test is will it burn your finger? Check the motherboard specs and make sure you are not over clocking the cpu voltage. Call a local vendor who sells your motherboard MB books have been known to be wrong. Good luck! Bob "> ` Bob "> `

Graywords I think bob has found your problem Royce