Wedge,
That machine should not be slow. My guess is you either have some sort of pest in there or there is a piece of hardware not properly configured/installed.
The questions would be where to start. I would run though:
Guide for Eliminating Spyware, Adware, and Random Popups
If you do not find anything, then I would get your system down to bare bones:
- 1 HD Primary Master
- 1 Optical Drive Secondary Master
- Floppy Drive
- AGP Vid Card
- No PCI Cards
- Keyboard
- Monitor
- Mouse
If that does not give us any hints at the problem we could take a look at Hijack This! to see what it shows.
Take Care,
Richard