wah-wah sound, jerky video, everything slowed down

[salmonella]

Within the last week, for no obvious reason, suddenly all sounds (all
apps) come out with wah-wah superimposed, all videos and animations
(also all apps) are slowed down and jerky, the echo time between the
keys typed on the keyboard varies from instantaneous to 20 seconds
(with no apparent pattern), and pretty much everything is slowed down
a great deal. Turning the computer on used to take 20 seconds, now it
takes five to ten minutes. I'm assuming there's a corrupt file some
where, what with automatic, unsupervised updates from MS, Kaspersky,
Adobe, and whoever else, but where to look? I'll backup everything and
reinstall windows if I have to, but I'd rather not.

I'm running an HP laptop Pavilion dv5000,with MS Windows XP
Professional 5.1.2600, includes Service Pack 2 and IE 7.0 (which, come
to think of it, I installed about two weeks ago, when all of this
pretty much started. My IT department at work asked me to install IE
7.0 because it supposedly works better with Citrix.) I've got 2.0 GB
RAM (could go to 4.0), and my c-drive is running 93 GB used out of
110GB. I use Kaspersky AV and Firewall, and my internet is high speed
through Cox Cable.

Where to look, what to do?

S10 Scripsit

 

[salmonella]

What does the event viewer say ?

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Application Error
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1001
Date: 2/15/2008
Time: 11:52:23 AM
User: N/A
Computer: PC110995545484
Description:
Fault bucket 236215182.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 42 75 63 6b 65 74 3a 20 Bucket:
0008: 32 33 36 32 31 35 31 38 23621518
0010: 32 0d 0a 2..



Is this cryptic, or what? This is the most likely candidate in the
event viewer, but every now and again the event viewer also becomes
fixated on PerfNet, and goes off on tangent babbling about PerfNet.
Googling PerfNet is not helpful. From what I can see from Google
references, PerfNet is like Zen: ineffable, indescribable, yet very
important. And if you think you need to know what it is,that too is
an illusion, and one day you will go beyond that.

F. G. Scripsit