Well suffice to say I have no idea what's wrong with it. I came back to it one weekend after a tech guy had 'fixed' some viruses for me to find it taking literally 10 minutes to start up. Also got some corrupt .dll's and registry lines missing/corrupt. I'm not sure but I think it's a virus (posted in that section of the board and was told to try here first) - I don't see what normal error could cause it to be so temperamental.
When I opened IE I didn't get a connect box and sure enough, all my connections had been erased, I tried to add new but when I got to the screen where I wanted to say 'dial-up' and then put in my details all were greyed out except the broadband option.
Since then I've gotten lots of cases where programs won't open because of various file errors (which also happen randomly), and later paging file too small (which I've fixed). I've been running Spybot, Anti Spyware, Ad Aware, and Norton, Avast and AVG - although since I have no net I haven't got up-to-date definitions. I've also run RegSupreme which helped a bit.
Not sure what else to say, I have a HackThis log if it would be helpful...

Thanks

Seeing that HJThis is getting you going please let us know if we can be of any more help here after that process.