Pausing/Crashing

Hi all,

I'm having a weird problem and I'm not sure what the issue could be. I am running Windows XP, with a 2.4 ghz p-iv (533 mhz), Gigabyte 8IHXP board, 512 mb RDRAM, with 2x60 gb Maxtor 7200 rpm drives in a RAID 0 array using the promise controller on my motherboard. The system has run beautifully thus far (since December), but only over the past two days has been problematic. It used to take about 10 seconds to boot once I saw the "loading winxp screen," but now takes about two minutes. In addition, it feels sluggish at times, and is much more prone to crashing. I cannot run a long disk-intensive program, like a virus scanner (AVG) or disk defragmenter (microsoft) without the system crashing after a few minutes. Mouse input will stop, and after I hit a few keys (often I'll hit [ESC]) the keyboard interrupt will not be accessed (num lock will stop toggling the light on the keyboard).

I did not install any new software at the time the trouble started, although I did load Morrowind early last week (which has run without a hitch, and still runs relatively well...though it pauses now and then).

So my question is basically, what do you folks think? Does it sound like an XP problem? Or does it sound like a hardware problem? I'm concerned it could be my power supply, my motherboard, or maybe even my drives? Is it worth reinstalling XP to see if that fixes it? Or is there something I can do to check on the motherboard or the drives?

Thanks so much for any advice,
Justin