Ah @#!%, I spoke too soon. It just did it again!

Ok, since you're back where you started, I'll jump in. What you're describing is a phenomenon some people call a mini freeze. Read more about it here. There used to be a lot more information about it on annoyances.org, but since they dropped their internal search engine and started using Google it seems to be much harder to find stuff there.

If you really want to get into it, you'll need to go to black viper's site, read all about the services, and disable all the ones you don't need. Disabling a bunch of services is what allows me to run XP and some heavy duty applications on a Celeron 466.

As for Macs, they are not the rock solid crash proof performers that they once were. I recently did an upgrade from OS9 to OS X for a friend and it was a nightmare. Doing some research on OS X I discovered that it is having its fair share of problems too. Probably not as much as windows, but certainly nothing like the old days when everything was proprietary and tightly integrated.

Rick, I think you hit the nail on the ol' head here. I'll check out your link as it makes sense what you're talking about here.
Thanks!

Arrrgh, I just tried the link and it doesn't work. One of my major annoyances is that http://www.annoyances.org is only a shadow of its former self! If the link doesn't work, go to the Windows 2000 forum (yes 2000, not XP) and search for "mini freeze".

The service descriptions on Black Viper's site are here.

You must have tried the very moment that I went to the link. I copied the pages and I'm going to get to work on it.