My computer is not working and my mom’s (which I have to use) is FUBAR.
My mom’s computer has been acting VERY strange lately. It has Windows XP Pro (YES, I realise this may be responsible in some way). Almost everytime I open Internet Explorer, it will freeze in the middle of opening my homepage and I’ll have to terminate the process via the task manager. I have to do this repeatedly until it works. Also, when I double click the volume icon in the task bar to open sndvol32.exe to adjust the sound, nothing will happen. I check the Task Manager and the sndvol32.exe process is there, but not doing anything. I have to click the volume icon until it does come up. Lots of other programs will do this. They’ll appear to do nothing but their process will be there eating up system resources. The PC also reboots about 1-2 times a day for no reason. Any of these problems related?
I think it may be after effects of all the power outs we’ve been having.
i think you got the worst virus of all time: Windows!!! it happens to me a lot with no reason at all.this computer they sell to us are all worthless!!! worthless i say! LMAO let’s go outside and burn them all! ha ha ha ha ha!!! let’s burn everything! ROFLMAO…oops! sorry
just get your recovery cd and do a factory restore i guess. 
I’ve been using XP Pro on my laptop for the past few months without a single problem. I know it’s crazy with my whole computer background being in Linux, but I haven’t had a single a problem with XP Pro. But then again, right after I loaded it up, I spent about three days modifying the registry and other things. So I did take away a lot of the typical “windows” tendencies.
It sounds like you have data corruption. There is a possibility of hardware problems, but most likely data corruption from the power outages. You could do a reload, then if it does it again, you’ll know it’s hardware. Then the next thing to check would be the powersupply then hard drive. Now problems in the motherboard can do the same thing, but those are usually related to overclocking and modding. So I doubt that would be it.
Hope you get it working right
If it’s with a specific task I’m not sure it would be the PSU. I’ve had bad PSUs before and they usually attack during boot, giving keyboard lockouts and the like.
It’s not RAM as I’ve had that too and that is just completely random and annoying till you finally figure out what it is.
I’d go for the corrupt hard-disk option… backup all important info and format the harddrive, make sure cd is the first boot device in the bios and put the XP Pro disk in the drive. Choose to format hard disk NTFS when the option comes up and XP should do the rest for you. (leaving you no option to not install those programs you really don’t want… oh well I guess you can uninstall them later.)
Once its installed install you video, sound etc… drivers.
Warning: If you are not entirely happy with all this do not do it as there is nothing worse than a wiped computer with nothing on it and you don’t know how to fix it. (Luckily the only time that ever happened to me was with MS-DOS and I figured that one out meself. 
Good luck…
Alex
Did you instal SP1?
Martin
Theeth: I dunno.
My Dad ahemobtainedahem WinXP Pro, and I have NO idea how to get around all the copy protection.
Therefor I cannot reinstall.
I had to wipe my computer because of windows ME - it wouldn’t let me install Norton Antivirus and then I got 2 virus’ which kept on crashing my computer. Stupid windows…
LOL, windows ME sucks.
this computer they sell us are all worthless i repeat…i can’t even update my antivirus anymore! what if i catch a virus? :< :<
Check for spyware- get Adaware or the like, my GF’s laptop would randomly slow to a crawl, acting siezed, running the Adaware found 4 running processes (gator, etc) and a ton of registry entries. Killing them all solved the problem.
I did that and a virus checker.
I had a whole bunch of stuff from Wild Tangent.