Sure, we are all using Firefox now to browse with tabs, but I, among others, was having issues with the amount of advertising and crap on my screen. Adblock is a rather useful extension, but there are so many places the ads come from...

Another problem was that when I clicked on a link, XP was taking a good few seconds to resolve the link and do something with it.

Well, the answer to this issue is your HOSTS file. It is a system file that lives in various places on various systems. I've now modified mine to solve an issue with a network share, block a huge number of adservers totally (and more than Adblock does, which downloads the advert then hides it, allowing you to be tracked regardless!), and the happy side efect is my browsing is much, much more responsive!

http://www.accs-net.com/hosts/how_to_use_hosts.html tells you a bit about it, and http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt gives you a sample hosts file for your system, with 400Kb (in text!) of adserver addresses.

The root problem lies in the use of XP. It's a well-known resource hog and notoriously slow.

Win2K Pro is generally considered the most stable of the Win* O/S, which just so happens to be what Mega and I use. :)

I haven't had to reinstall my OS (2K) in several years, though there's always the occassional reboot.