Massive Slow-Down in XP

Hello,

My computer has recently suffered massive slow-down which has rendered it useless.

The deal is this: I was on my computer last night, merely going about my business. It was fine. I didn't install any programs. The only thing I did do was a Microsoft Update for Windows Defender. I then read some e-mails (none containing any .exe files or anything like that before you ask), and finally a mucked about with some music files, that's it.

Then i shutdown my computer. Just as it did, I realised that I needed to do something, so I turned it back on. When it came back on, it was fine - until I tried to do anything.

To begin with, when I opened IE, it was fine, until I right-clicked, then the whole thing froze. Nothing. Couldn't even Ctrl+Alt+Del. No mouse movement - totally frozen. So I restarted, and tried again, and the same thing happened. So I restarted again, and this time as soon as I clicked the Start button, the whole thing froze.

Some of my icons had lost their colouring and some of the pixels on my rather rubbish 15" TFT had started looiking like they were dead, which was very strange. I thought I was having graphical issues or the monitor was struggling or dying, so I decided to chop down my res from 1024 x 768 to the next one, which is 960 x 680 or something, I can't remember. When I selected apply, the new resolution never showed. The screen was just black. I restarted again, and the pixel problem went away, and it started up in the new, lower res, but some of the icons were still discoloured. As I thought it was graphical, I ran a video to see how it was, but as soon as you double-click a folder, the whole thing dies.

I decided to see if it was a driver issue by starting up in Safe Mode. In SM, the computer was fine. Everything seemed to work as normal. I tried to open a video and the video worked, although it was choppy. I decided to do a system restore back to when I knew the PC worked fine. I did this, changed the res back to 1024 and restarted.

When it booted up again, where the desktop should appear, I get nothing - just black - as if the monitor can no longer handle the res. It's very weird. That's as far as I got yesterday as it was very late.

So I'm wondering if you guys have any clues on what to do? My plan is once I get home, to boot in Safe Mode, uninstall/reinstall graphics drivers, run anti-virus, ad-aware, spyware and MS defender and all that jazz and see what it picks up. I don't know if the problem was due to heat - it's not THAT hot in the UK at the moment and my ThermaTake HSF is more than capable. I was going to open Motherboard Monitor 5 to check the temps, but as it was so slow, I didn't get the chance.

Any clues guys? I'm stumped on this one.

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