Programs freezing and shutting down

[Big Al]

Several programs, including --

AOL, IE, Norton Antivirus (but not the other utilities),
and system restore

come up for a short while, freeze, then shutdown.
Sometimes a window with a DOS command appears briefly
after the shutdown.

I'm running XP on a 2-year old Sony VAIO. i installed a
new hard drive about 2 months ago. Everything's been fine
until two weeks ago. Microsoft products, Word and
Frontpage appear to run fine.

Steps I've taken --
Norton Utilities is up to date and I've run everything,
except the virus program, numerous times.
I also get Windows updates automatically/
I downloaded the anti-sasser program on another computer,
copied it to a floppy and installed and ran it on the
computer with the problems.
The problems I described suddently went away last
weekend. As a precaution, I did a system restore to about
a week before the problems started. The problems came
back and I haven't been able to get rid of them since. I
get no relevant errors when I run Norton utilities. I
can't run Norton antivirus (I get a message to contact
Norton) but the anti-sasser program checks for quite a few
viruses. It found none. During the brief time that this
pc was working last weekend, I was able to run Norton anti-
virus and nothing should up.

 

[riz]

Did you run scan disk/defrag?
Empty TIF and History.?

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the suggestions. I tried each of them but had
no luck.
Big Al