Okay, I was installing a Gravis Xperience program and my computer locked up. I reset it and a lot of files were corrupted. Then I could no longer get the installer for the Gravis program to load so I deleted a registry setting for improcserv32.

Well XP loads okay, but when I select search from the start button nothing happens, find doesn't work in Internet Explorer, Norton continually says refreshing and Windows Update never gets past the searching part and never shows a percentage. Any ideas?

Sounds a lot like a virus hijacked your PC and corrupted some of your data.

Often times, when you install a program and afterward your computer gets frozen, it's a sign of either incompatibility or malware.

My advice is to make sure you have as much virus protection as possible: Ad-Aware SE, Spybot S&D, Spyware Doctor, Spysweeper, ZoneAlarm, McAffee, etc. I know you mentioned Norton, but sometimes trojans go chiefly after anitvirus software. Tricky, eh?

P.S. Steelers rock.

Shuttle XPC SN95
AMD 3500+ @ 2.84 GHz Venice core
ATI Radeon X800 XT
1 GB Corsair XMS
240 GB Western Digital HDD

Don't go around deleting Registry entrys. They do no harm.

If nothing helps, re-install Windows Xp.

Joshua,
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