Hi Scott,

It sounds to me like you have a corrupted registry. A full reinstall might be necessary. As to purchasing a new HD, I like Western Digital Caviar Series, 7200 rpm, 8Mb Cache, 250Gb.

to see all the programs you have loaded in memory during startup, you can also go to Programs/Accessories/System Tools/System Information.

Select Startup Programs. It'll show you all the programs that get started during bootup.
You can remove them by going to regedit and look at their registry location.

Hope that helps.

Claude