After a week of stubbornly trying to fix this myself I'm ready to admit I've probably made things worse. I need to spend this weekend troubleshooting in an organized manner. I would appreciate any and all ideas as long as they are backed by methods or links. Last Saturday a.m. my husband installed a new processor (went from a Celeron to a Pentium). He's done this before on most of our household computers so there was no concern. Updated drivers and BIOS. By the end of the day my computer was hosed and I kicked him off and almost sent him packing. I began messing with it myself. Bottom line was, that night I ended up doing a system restore to a date prior to the new CPU installation. Not sure what happens or doesn't happen in a system restore, but here I sit with the new CPU installed and afraid there's a worm or spyware or wrong drivers or broken Windows or lord only knows. My computer's still a mess. Add or Remove Programs takes (I timed it) one and a half hours to "populate" the list. I can open Programs from the Start menu but in the file tree it takes five minutes for the program directory to populate. Any task related to cutting, pasting, copying, etc. take five minutes. Menus/windows don't display for five minutes. Even simple things, like creating a new folder in a directory when you're doing a right-click save (say of an image), take five minutes to perform. Also, maybe unrelated, "Windows Media Licenses" are corrupt. Also, maybe unrelated, my sound skips whenever I run a program or an event happens in the background (this is the original reason we got the new CPU). I have normal functions in non-file programs -- my internet, FrontPage, Outlook, etc. are completely fine. The computer boots fine. So -- where do I start? I hope that there's a simple and obvious answer and that I've over-complicated things. Thanks in advance for bothering to read this. Here's what I've got: Motherboard: ASUS P4PE Processor: Pentium 4 2.8 ghz RAM: 1GB BIOS: revision 2.0.0...something Sound: runs off mboard, SoundMax Video: Radeon 7500 Drivers: How do I know if I need to uninstall/reinstall?

How to do a system repair.--Boot from the xp cd and go past the recovery console to the install menu. Select repair the existing installation. You won't lose any data except the xp updates. Unless you have a slipstream sp1 Or SP2 cd you will have to d/l sp1 or sp2 and all subsequent updates. You MUST have at least SP1 installed and the updates for security reasons. Be sure the firewall and A/V is active before going online as you will be susceptible to sasser and msblaster. http://computervitals.com/

Have you tried this after CPU replacement-- How to Perform an In-Place Upgrade (Reinstallation) of Windows XP

Thanks per and Chuck 2. I will focus on your suggestions tomorrow morning first thing, and report back here!

Bonnie.-A reply is very much appreciated. http://computervitals.com/

http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/143518.html http://www.compphix.com/windowsfileprotection.html

robertj-Neither of those will help the problem. http://computervitals.com/