Crashes, constant lockups, etc.

[Amras]

Alright, I've been having the following problems for quite a while now.



1) It starts when I start up Windows. It simply doesn't. All you get to see is the background and nothing more. I have to go to the task manager, end explorer.exe, restart explorer.exe and then it logs in just fine.
2) My CD-rom drive, which worked fine yesterday, doesn't show up anymore. In fact, although it still works the computer simply doesn't seem to recognize it.
3) Random freezing. Whether that be when I start up Winamp or when I am in the middle of a game. I even see it crash sometimes when I start up Mozilla Firefox.
4) I've tried AdAware and Norton Antivirus, to no success. It keeps stopping at the WINNT/system32/

Any idea what this might be?

[MaDef]

need system specs. Have you tried running scandisk, and defraging the hard drive?
Have you tried repairing the os install?
could be a few different hardware problems including, PSU, memory, harddrive, cpu could be on the verge of failing. or heat (failing fans, or dirty fans and heatsinks).

Run a scandisk of the drive, defrag, and repair the operating system.

[Spider]

Run a scandisk of the drive
There is no scandisk in Windows 2000, it's chkdsk in Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

You also want to boot to Safe Mode (press F8 key at one second intervals while computer is starting)
to run the disk defragmenter. That would be the last command to run before chkdsk /r and the windows repair.

Windows repair and chkdsk /r should also be run from booting to your Windows 2000 CD.
Windows repair is under the Install selection when booting to the CD and chkdsk /r
is run from the Recovery Console selection on boot to the CD.