Hi Jo...

Hubby says his initial thought is that your CPU (AMD Athlon XP1800) is too slow/old/outdated (his words) to efficiently run WindowsXP.

WinXP uses a lot of system resources, so it needs a good system in order to run without sucking all the resources out of your system.

Has WinXP ever run effectively on this PC in the past? If you have had WinXP on this machine before, and it worked fine before, then that complicates things and makes the list of possibilities quite long and quite difficult to figure out without actually loking at the system.

He also said that one possibility could be a virus on one of the hard drives that remains in the system even after doing a re-install of Windows... have you run a good virus-scan lately that checks for both Windows and Linux viruses?

Even as he is telling me about the other possibilities, he keeps repeating "it's gotta be the 1800 though, an 1800 just can't handle WinXP".

So, that's what my geek says, and I hope it helps.

Liz