Bernie….
This sounds similar to the start of my pc woes. I found no virus or descriptions of this… but from the desktop refreshing it degraded to windows rebooting with various error messages on windows startup, toolbars and desktop icons disappearing, to finally the pc refusing to boot at all! Basically got to loading windows with a brief blue screen and would boot itself over and over.
I am on my pc now (waiting for a new one) had to reinstall xp 5 times and 4 formats but things are not right at all.
Trying to install software and some gives corrupt messages…
Windows still crashes and explorer is still playing up.
I haven’t found any hardware conflicts and it is a bit of a mystery…anyone else heard of similar?