I recently had a DSL line hooked up and now for whatever reason I have random lockups with my computer.  1 odd catch though is if I go into task view and "end task" on "Explorer" the lock up goes away and I can continue.  Any ideas anyone?Additionally I don't EVEN KNOW what "Explorer" is in the task view.  When I have Internet Explorer open it is listed separately.  And right now when I open task view "Explorer" isn't even running.  I'm somewhat at a loss.  I have run anti-virus, ad-aware, spybot and hopefully I'm clean.  Thanks for your help ahead of time.I ran a registry CLEANER that found about 75 things askew.  Who knows how long those things had been bogging me down.  Computer runs just fine now and actually a bit faster then b4 all this started.Premature celebration.  No fix as of yet, got the lock up again this morning and continued since
OK...since I seem to be talking to myself or I have everyone who reads this stumped (which I was) I have found a solution that seems to have the problem solved.  I set up Zone Alarm firewall program.  One of the settings allows you to approve each program individually when it tries to reach out to the internet.  Well explorer.exe was trying to reach out to the internet.  I told it that it wasn't allowed and since then, for TWO days or so, its worked fine.  This makes sense with the steps I was taking to shutdown explorer to unlock my comp.  Somehow explorer was getting bogged down for some reason when trying to contact the internet.  Who knows.  Good LUCK with your problem whatever it is.