Not sure where to look

I'm having a peculiar problem. In the last couple of days, my XP install
started to hang when any program launched. When I launched a program, the
CPU would ramp up to 100% for a while until, eventually, the program
launched. Once the program was running successfully, everything was fine and
there were no CPU issues.

Now, today, I can get into XP fine, but programs are simply not launching
any more. They're showing up in task manager, but they rarely load more than
5-6MB into memory and never finish loading. The CPU doesn't peg, and the
drive doesn't spin; the program simply stops loading. A few programs DO
load: Windows Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Trillian, the Add/Remove Programs
app (though some uninstallers will not load because of this problem),
sysinternals.com Process Explorer... There's no obvious pattern.

There also aren't any events in the Event Viewer that appear relevant.

I'm competent to troubleshoot and fix just about any problem on this beast,
but this one has been puzzled. A clue where to look would be nice.

Oh, and I didn't change any settings or install any programs that would
cause this. Near as I can tell, it's doing this entirely on its own.

Thanks for any help.
.

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