I'm not trying to be cute when I say it that way, it's just that I have no other explanation for it's behavior right now!

I have an MSI K8MM3-VH motherboard, VIA chipset, an AMD Athlon XP x64 2.2 GHz processor, 2 GB's Kingston DDR400 RAM, an NVIdia GeForce 7600 256 MB AGP video card, a Creative Audigy SE PCI sound card, two Seagate 80 GB hard drives, a Thermaltake 430 watt power supply. I run Vista Basic x64 with Firefox on a cable connection.

Like many setups I read about, my system ran fine at first, but over time, started getting sluggish and unresponsive. Now before I go on, I should mention that, when I was getting ready to by this motherboard, I could not get MSI to confirm whether it would work on Vista x64 or not.

Each time I called, one technician said it would work on Vista, another one said it wouldn't. Another technician even said it would work on Vista x32, but not x64. So I've got that going against me. I have the x64 VIA chipset drivers installed along with all of my Windows patches including SP1.

I've been running ESET Smart Security along with a few other antispyware apps and everything is up to date. I have had a few problems in the past with spyware, so much so that it forced me to perform a recovery of my C drive by using Acronis True Image, so that might have something to do with what I have heard described as a lack of integrity with my system files.

However, everything has gotten slowwwwwww! And from the time I press my power button to the time that my network system tray icon shows I'm connected to the internet, it takes a good two minutes. Also navigating to different directories is slow, along with getting Firefox and Windows Mail to open up speedily.

The oddest thing about my system performance is that I'm unable to install several video authoring apps that I've been wanting to try. They just will not install.

Now I should mention at this point, that I try to take very good care of my system. I don't use a registry cleaner, but have performed, what I believe is some safe, manual deleting of registry entries in the past. I also keep Windows free of junk file and defraged regularly.

I have run system file checker without any results coming back, CHKDSK, which did not find any errors and both MemTest86 and the Windows memory test, each of which showed no errors.

Having said all of that, I'm out of ideas!

Have you tried Malwarebytes antimalware?

VIA chipset, an AMD Athlon XP x64 2.2 GHz processor, 2 GB's Kingston DDR400 RAM, an NVIdia GeForce 7600 256 MB AGP video card, a Creative Audigy SE PCI sound card, two Seagate 80 GB hard drives, a Thermaltake 430 watt power supply. I run Vista Basic x64 with Firefox on a cable connection.