[adomakin]

hi blokes, thanks for all your replies. I had another look for any old apps that i didn't need/use and deleted them. also i had a couple of things running on startup that i didn't recognise so i deleted them. I had already run a full norton 360 scan and adaware scan (lavasoft) they both came up with the same issues-two tracking cookies. they were deleted but the problem was still there.
sonic, I went to system restore but the only restore point was at a time AFTER the problem! im sure i created a restore point when a bought the computer a few months ago but it wasn't there.
450, just did a defrag. thought it was being done automatically but it wasn't scheduled.
gr8, in 'processes my cpu usage is jumping from 0 to 60%! and yet none of the processes in the list are doing anything more than around 5% max!
physical memory says 2037mb, don't really understand what you mean by 'how many mb on the memory graph' sorry!