This must necessarily be a rather vague question, so I apologize in advance. For several months, my online browsing has been maddeningly slow. I have Roadrunner broadband, and it never used to be slow. But now simple web pages regularly take at least 10 seconds to load, and often much longer. It seems to be worse in IE than Firefox. But I can see no pattern: sometimes a page will load relatively quickly, sometimes very slowly, sometimes not at all. If I click a link and it fails to load, or if I get a 'could not find' error, if I hit F5 it will usually load the page with no problem. In short, I might as well go back to a 56k dial-up modem.

Roadrunner of course says it's not their fault because all the speed tests show good results. And the fact that I can regularly listen to streaming audio with no problems would suggest that they are probably right. But I've scanned for Spyware (with Ad-Aware) and viruses (with AVG free); according to HijackThis nothing bad is getting loaded at startup; I uninstalled AVG virus and Sygate firewall; I even went so far as to reformat my hard drive and reinstall Win XP. The problem was better after that, but not entirely gone.

It also takes a long time for Outlook Express to check my email accounts. Downloads can also lag. Otherwise, my system runs fine when I'm doing things on the desktop.

I would appreciate any help or suggestions.

You seemed to have covered all the bases in your post.

If you would like a second opinion on interpreting your HiJack This log then:

Please follow owen's Instructions and then post your log in a new thread in the Spyware, Adware, Viruses and HijackThis Logs section. (Not in this section please).

Check the Task Manager for CPU usage.

Or perhaps try troubleshooting possible hardware issues.

RAM tests:
http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

Hard drive tests:
http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287