Unstable computer - Computer Q&A Board

Sorry for the long e-mail, but I hope you read it and can shed some light on my problems.  I'll be brief in the future but I'm really stuck here.

I recently purchased RegVac at the recommendation of a knowledgeable friend.  I also bought Secunia Personal Software Inspector and Driver Detective.  I run McAfee total protection and perform full virus scans regularly.  I keep my operating systems updated.  The first time I ran RegVac it reported close to 2000 fixable items.  I operated in the Novice or green zone because it said it was safe.  I ran RegVac in the Yellow mode once and accepted some of the cleanup recommendations.  I’ve been working with PC’s since the mid eighties but I don’t write or understand code and stay out of the registry.

Secunia showed that there were several versions of Adobe Flash, Java & other applicationss that that were “end of life” programs and could make the computer vulnerable to hackers.  I removed them all.  Driver Detective discovered old drivers for many programs, including the one for my ATI Radeon 1650 video card, which I try to keep current.  All drivers are now supposedly current.  The only thing I haven’t messed with is the motherboard BIOS – that makes me nervous.

I have a custom barebones computer with swappable drives with an ATI Radeon 1650 video card, Intel DQ0965GF mother board, 4 Gigabytes of RAM (DDR2, I think) and 2 swappable, bootable hard drives, one with Vista SP1 & the other one with XP Pro Sp3.  I have two internal storage hard drives (an old 140 Gig and a newer 500 Gig) and I have two 1 TB external drives for backup – I am an avid amateur photographer & have hundreds of Gig of image files.  I have two DVD/CD burners, one is Lightscribe capable.

This whole mess started when I upgraded to Adobe CS4 Design Suite Premium and was unable to install it in my Vista SP1 Drive, which was my primary drive since Vista was released it two years ago.  I have had lots of problems with Vista over the past two years, but put up with them.  After more than 10 hours on the phone with Adobe tech support (they’re worthless),  I put in my XP SP3 drive (I have swappable bootable drives) and was able to install the entire CS4 Suite.  It was then when I decided to buy RegVac and the other programs to make sure my PC was not being bogged down by old stuff.

Here’s the thing:  the computer has become unstable.  The Adobe CS4 applications sometimes crash or simply disappear (task manager doesn’t even show them as running) while I’m working on them.  I like playing Spider Solitaire and Pinball.  Those programs suddenly vanished from my computer.   The icon for Internet Explorer (V7) is gone and I had to go to the Windows directory, find iexplore.exe to run it & create a new shortcut for my taskbar.  I can also run it from the run command in the start menu.

Any suggestions?

Thank you for your anticipated help,
johnmh