KatieinTC,

The difference between starting in Normal Mode and starting in Safe Mode is that an abosolute minimum of drivers is loaded in Safe Mode. Since your problem does not occur under those conditions, the problem would appear to be corruption in one of your system's drivers. Uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers may correct the problem.

(If you have "lots of client data and preferences" and don't have them backed up, which would make reinstallation of XP less problematic, you should evaluate the security of that data with a view toward routine backups.)

Thanks - I thought I did that as prior to the installation of SP2.  I have updated the BIOS and all of the other hardware drivers I can think of. 

I back up daily, due to the nature of my business, to an external hard drive.  My concern about reinstalling XP is that I purchased the PC w/XP and that's the CD I have.  Won't there be an issue reinstalling XP if I've already installed SP2?

Any other insight would be appreciated.

Thanks :)

KatieinTC,

No issue. The XP Reinstallation CD removes all the contents of the drive when you delete the C:\ partition (see this), so its installation will not know that SP2 had been on the system. If you have a broadband connection you can download SP2 again (or if you have the SP2 CD you already have it). After XP is installed, install the chipset drivers, then SP2, then the rest of the drivers followed by your applications. SP2 will install all Critical Updates released between the time your XP CD was made and the release date of SP2.

Mr Howell is on the money. I have spent the last two days working on my daughter's Inspiron 1150. She brought it home from school and it was freezing and just generally not working well enough to use. It took six hours for Norton run a virus scan!
I ran Norton as mentioned, Ad Aware, Spybot and found many things and removed all of them but the computer did not respond.
After a long discussion on the phone with Dell today, as he patronizinly instructed me to do the adware removal and virus removal I have already done, I ended up doing a PC Restore and everything seemed back to normal.
A couple of hours later, boom, back to a crawl.
After reading this post I found that the 2.6 ghz chip was running at 311 mhz! I did a restore to just before sp 2 was downloaded and installed and now the machine is back up to 2.6 ghz and running fine. And I spent two days when I most likely could have done a restore to previous of XP SP 2 and been fine.
Thank God for these message boards. If I had to depend on Dell tech. support I would still be trying to figure this out.