I bought the following system after doing a lot of research and reading and its frustrating to see the system freezing every now and then. the specs are

MSI P6N Diamond
Intel C2D E6850 3.0Ghz
MSI NX8800 Ultra 768MB
Kingston KHX6400D2LLK2/2GN 2GB RAM
Maxtor 120GB HDD
Sony DVD-RW DRU830A
Cooler Master iGreen 600W PSU
Cooler Masster Stacker 810 Casing
WinXP SP2 with august 2007 autopatcher updates

The problem i noted is that with a fresh copy loaded with common softwares like Corel12, Office 2003, Adobe Acrobat Pro, Adobe Dreamweaver, Flash and Photoshop CS3 the system freezes when browsing the files and folders. When restared if you are lucky you can boot to windows and sometimes it won't load windows and i have to repair it from the windows repair console from windows xp cd. First time it happened with a Seagate 120GB SATA HDD and when it happend last time i couldn't even install windows and found out that the HDD was damaged.

I replaced with a Maxtor 120GB HDD and loaded with the same software configuration and still it happens, and now i can't boot and tried to repair from xp cd and it says unrecoverable error in the 6% of the progress and it stops.

Played games like GRAW, Overlord and Crysis and during playing no slowing or freezing only it happens when browsing the HDD Content.

Could anyone pls help me with this.

Thanx

I don't see anything wrong with the list.

What programs do you use to browse the harddisk contents? My Computer? If so, do you have any security/privacy software installed?

i use My Computer to browse the drives and for security i use only NOD32 antivirus 2.5 and nothing else

Ah, it may be the security software nod32. Try disabling it before browsing the files.

the network i look after has approx 100 systems loaded with NOD32 and it's been 3+ yrs i have been working with NOD32 and i have never come across such event.

i used Ultimate Boot CD for windows and found out that the other partition of same HDD i have created is completely gone and tried a chkdsk and it failed but none of the HDD diagonosis programs i have used shows any Damaged sectors.

tried to recover using xp cd and reinstalling over the existing windows from xp cd but says there is an internal error and when booted from that HDD says some files missing.

will try to format and reinstall a fresh copy and test without loading nod32

I use Nod32/Win XP SP2 (Same mobo) - all works fine, instead of just re-formatting - delete the partition...

This is the 3rd time that it has happened to critical point where i can't repair or reinstall windows over the existing partition and the first time it happened the HDD completely got damaged so i got a replacement. will try installing fresh OS with latest MSI drivers.

Yeh this is what im saying - dont just re-format. Delete the partition and let windows setup do its thing ..... Only drivers ya really need are lastest nforce 680i, nvidia display drivers, creative xi-fi drivers (i ended up disabling xi-fi and using audigy)

I have updated my mobo's BIOS to the latest v1.3 and installed a fresh copy of XP with autopatcher AUG 2007 core and latest drivers. and again the system hanged even when i tried to open MY COMPUTER. I had to reset and again i can't boot into windows now. So i got a new IDE HDD and will replace the SATA HDD. Guess the problem is with the SATA

Make sure you arent connecting both a SATA power cable and the legacy 4 pin power connector. If you connect both of them at the same time it can damage your hard drive.

Well by the list of software you mention, one needs to assume that your xp was downloaded from a torrent with your other programs. If so, more power to you, I don't care. But it is possible if thats the case that you disks may be infected with major virus's.

Did the IDE fix the prob? If not maybe try running it with minimum hardware to see what happens. (unplug extra drives and disable extra onboard stuff). That'll help rule out some hardware items which could be corrupting the data. Make sure its not over clocked too.

Once I had a situation where a drive cable was too close to some hardware and wasn't shielding well enough for some reason. It took me a bit to figure out because I had replaced the cable two times and it didn't fix it.

Next time you wipe and repartition it, install a clean copy of Windows and don't put in the NOD/Corel/Adobe stuff. See if it runs stable with the default drivers (don't install any extra hardware drivers yet). Turn off your extra services like system restore, indexing, removable storage, volume shadow copy and any other non-essentials.

If you don't have stability after than then try the different driver versions for your MB and hardware. Sometimes probs like this can be caused by seemingly unrelated things like browsing file system causes your DVD spins up which causes a brown out in an underpowered system.

If nothing you do on the software side of things seems to work then try moving your drive to another port. Overheating is kinda singled out because you said you're able to use apps and play games which would tax ram, cpu, video and the hdd when they're loaded. If the problem is getting progressively worse then consider that something to check (some thermal grease can turn to crap, it happen on my 2.4Ghz)

Good luck with fixing your system. Cheers.

Ensure to reset your bios settings to factory default too.