Hi there, I hope someone can help me because Im ready to drop this computer in a field near Roswell New Mexico! Its a Gateway purchased in 2003, Pentium 4 cpu 2.66GHZ, 496 MB of ram. Operating system is MS windows XP Home Edition, ver 2002, Service pack 2. 80 Gig hard drive ide.
Problem: After starting up the computer and about 5 minutes into using any program, like e-mail or e-bay, the borders on the screen turn white, a message comes up and states that Windows Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience. If you were in the middle of something, the information you were working on might be lost. Well so far I havent lost anything but I KILLs my audio device. No playing my cd's. The audio is fine until this (problem occurs. I tried windows explorer update 7. Bad news. The computer froze consistenly.
ANY IDEAS???????? Dave

   Just to rule out power options, I would suggest going to the Power Options section of the Control Panel and selecting Never for each of the items in the Setting section on the Power Schemes tab.  Click OK or Apply and then see if that solves the problem.
   If it doesn't, you can set them back to the way they were before.