Total system lag. Very little drive activity.

OVERVIEW
It now takes more than an hour to boot up windows, and when it does boot up, it will take several minutes for each action to complete – like clicking the mouse. The drive light only shows sporadic activity. The taskbar does not load all of the system tray icons and the system clock will stall and then skip ahead. I want to buy a new PC for myself, but I would like to upgrade this PC for my wife.

HISTORY
• The PC is almost 5 years old, but it has worked faithfully all this time.
• Shortly after getting the PC, I moved. At this time, there was some indication that the BIOS was not updated. I do not remember the specific reason, but I believe that I had problem with the I/O port on my MB and it was diagnosed by a friend as probably needing a BIOS update. I took it to a computer shop and they said the same thing.
• The other indication that the BIOS needed to be updated is that the PC would fail to enter sleep mode. It would attempt to enter sleep mode, and then immediately it would wake up again. I was told this was a BIOS issue.
• I was, however, unable to verify the exact BIOS version needed, and my MB model had several versions available – so I never completed the BIOS update.
• I am not sure now if it was ever really needed, as the computer has had several new devices and 2 new graphics cards installed since then, all without much problem.
• Some time ago, the C drive began to fill up. I solved this problem by relocating the MY DOCUMENTS folder to another drive.
• Recently the C drive began to fill up and I was down to 1 GB of free space. I deleted some old files and removed some old software and it is up to 2.3 GB now.
• The page file was set to 1500MB for both the minimum and maximum size.

THE FULL STORY
• The PC was unplugged for about 2 weeks when we were on holidays, and upon our return, the computer failed the POST test. There was some kind of BIOS message on the screen. I ignored it and rebooted the computer. It passed POST and booted properly.
• After a few days of running, the PC seemed a bit sluggish in some actions. Delays following mouse clicks, but nothing very noticeable.
• I got into the habit of rebooting every 12 hours or so, and that seemed to fix the problems.
• Finally, I was playing a game when the game locked up. I closed it down from the process list of the task manager. It was then that I noticed that Adobe Distiller (IIRC) started up spontaneously.
• I had declined to update my Adobe product earlier that day, so I just closed that process also.
• The Adobe process started again on its own – and I closed it. This repeated 2 more times.
• Then the PC just froze. No programs were responding and I was unable to switch from window to window on the task bar. The task bar was unresponsive.
• I tried to reboot the computer from the task manager – which was still working.
• The PC seemed to not want to shut down, so I did a hard reboot.
• After the PC rebooted, it passed the POST then loaded the “Windows loading” page.
• Normally after this page displays, there is a short period of a black screen while the monitor seems to readjust the resolution before showing the login page.
• This time it took nearly 10 minutes to get from the windows loading page to the login page.
• When the login page finally appears, it takes even longer to finish loading windows.
• I click the login user button and the windows wallpaper will load – but there is no task bar, no start button, nothing.
• It can take more than 20 minutes for the task bar to appear, but you can not activate it. The hourglass symbol appears when you mouse over anything on the task bar.
• While this is happening, there is very little drive activity. There are very long periods of no activity, and then the drive light will appear for a short time.
• I can open the task manager and watch the processes as they load. It seems to stall after a few processes are loaded, and then it can take 3 minutes for each new process to load.
• This will go on for more than 45 minutes. The system tray icons never do properly load.
• Finally the computer is usable – but it does not work properly. Each action may take seconds or even minutes to register.
• Example: a mouse click may take 10 seconds or 3 minutes before it will register.
• I have also noticed that during the windows loading period, the system clock in the system tray does not seem to work properly. The time will sometimes freeze and then jump ahead to get the correct time.

THE SPECS
CPU: AMD PC3200 (I forget the exact speed and I am not in front of my PC at this time)
MB: A8V-E DELUXE
RAM: 4GB PC3200 DDR SDRAM (IIRC)
CPU cooler: big and ugly with a fan
Video Card: nvidia 3200GTS (IIRC – most recent upgrade)
Power Supply: not sure of model, but it is a 550W IIRC
Hard drive(s): ah, several. My C drive is a 20GB drive that has only 2.3GB free
Operating System: Win XP
Case: Older model Antec with lots of fans.

STEPS TAKEN TO RESOLVE CONFLICT
1. Windows defender scan
2. Virus scan – using Trend Micro’s online beta scanner
3. Adaware and Registry booster (Uniblue)
4. Updated windows to SP3
5. Disabled some start up processes – like the printer and adobe and quicktime – nothing essential.
6. Booted up in safe mode and had the same problems (problem begins right after POST and before login, or before you get to choose safe mode)
7. Performed a system rollback to 2 months ago, when there were no issues or conflicts (and before the installation of the Adobe products)
8. Cried a little.
9. Came here to seek advice.

Please note that most of the actions above were painfully slow to complete – it takes an hour before I can actually open a program, and then the programs only seem to work in fits and starts as the drive light only shows sporadic and short bursts of activity. Some of these activities took 12 hours to complete.