Thanks, Gert. You are probably correct- I have fair amount of "junky" applications on board now- which I do use from time to time. But I am pretty sure that there are no nasties on board- at least not according to AVG (run every night), Adaware and Spybot, run regularly.
But it certainly is running slower than when new!! The hard drive regularly rattles away for some time, prior to getting on to a new page, etc.
1.4 Gh AMD Athlon 64 processor, 1Gb memory, Win XP
Any thoughts on where to look for slow-down nasties?