someone please help, my computer is running amuck!

hi everyone. i got referred to this forum by the people @ dell. so here goes...
a couple days ago my internet explorer kept opening up like 30something times. then when i tried to close em out with the task manager, that also opened up a bunch of times. finally i just shut the computer off and when i turned it back on, i got a black screen that said something to the effect of "unable to reboot..system halted"
i got this 3 times over a span of about two hours but it eventually let me back in. when i called dell for assistance, dude told me that my hard drive had gone bad but my computie is only three years old. i DL a trial of norton antivirus2005 and it detected 9...NINE viruses!but i dont have money to buy the full version right now so someone
told me about a place called trendmicro, and i ran their virus scan but it said i have none. hmm..?
i believe norton to be more accurate because something is definitely wrong with my computie.
my system idle process fluctuates in the high 90's and i was told it should be about 20something also indicating that something is in there, eating away...
some things i DL recently are a couple of fonts from 1001fonts[dot]com, and this set of emoticons from this other site. that's most likely where they came from, right? but it said i have 9 and that was only 3 that i DL. omg..i dont know what to do, can someone please tell me how i go about ridding my system of these pests? please..i am in dire need of help. last time my computie got something, dell had to internally reboot her and i ended up having to re-install all the programs again, not a problem then but now i CANNOT have this happen now because i no longer have the software that came packaged with my computer, i would basically lose everything and that would be a tragedy. :smileysad:
some other things seem to have been affected by this virus thingie...my widows media player doesn't gather info from the internet when i insert a cd (it usually does) and i've been unable to log into my yahoo messenger since this occurance. that's all i know.
do any know of anthing preferrably free cause i'm a poor student and i can't buy anything right now, lol.
any assistance in this matter is much appreciated.
tina.

o yea...i'm running on win xp. not sure if that makes a diff, but just in case. thanks!