Programs lock and won't close

-I'm running Win XP Pro on a 3 year old Dell.

Recently I've started to have programs freeze - mostly IE and Word. When
this happens I have to use Task Manager to close the program that is locked
up.

Related - Sometimes I click on a doc file to open it and Word won't even
open. When this happens I usually have to reboot.

I assume I've got a registry setting wrong or a coflict with a program
running in background (I have several). I've run Registry Mechanic. Did not
fix the problem.

Could you suggest a step-by-step process to ID and fix the culprit?
.

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