Massive Slowdown in Certain Programs

Recently I've experienced a massive slowdown in certain applications, all of which seem to use the internet--AIM, IE, Firefox.

AIM takes about 9 seconds to send a message, and freezes until it's sent. Firefox and IE freeze at the start of loading a page, and at the end as well.

Also, both IE and Firefox seem to freeze when there's streaming video, either in Flash or WMP.

Any ideas? It just started occurring a few days ago, I'm not exactly sure when though. I ran AVG and Ad-Aware; neither made a difference.

What OS? I've had some ping issues lately, which I'm attributing to a Windows update until proven otherwise.

What's at the top of the processes list in Task Manager when it occurs?

XP Home Edition Service Pack 2



Whichever program is slowed down is at the top, cpu-wise. Firefox is usually at the top in memory usage.

I had this happen after I installed some anti virus sofware but then I disabled all of its processes and it was back to normal.

Have you recently installed a sandboxing application like Sandboxie?

Are you running any anti-spyware software which can be temporarily disabled to help diagnose the problem?

Nope. I'm not even sure what that is.



I'm running some anti-virus software (AVG). Should I temporarily disable that?