It could be a lot of things.
From what I've read, it sounds like you've got either a corrupted operating system or a hard drive on the verge of dying. Either way, you may want to consider acquiring a 2nd hard drive, and reinstall XP on that new hard drive, so that you can boot onto that new hard drive and then copy some of yoru valued data from the old one onto that one.
Nothing blows more than losing a ton of digital pictures you never backed up onto DVD or CD.
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