Diagnosing *^&% Unpredictable Hangs

[lupini]

I had an issue last wk. with an apparent conflict between an antivirus plugin in network ADSL sharing software (Wingate) and NAV's email scanning which resulted in all sorts of grief which was (largely) relieved by a "last known good configuration" restoration. However, the system has remained unstable, altho less so. I uninstalled the plugin, NAV and Wingate, the last of which I reinstalled and it is at least running again. For a while 16 bit apps wouldn't run without ignoring a bad VDD registry entry error - which I fixed by recreating that registry value. I moved our most critical apps to another box on the network but would like to diagnose and fix the cause of the mystery hangs which continue to plague me - even if only now once a day (which is certainly an improvement over the 10 crashes a day we had last weekend and attendent implicit threats to my life). There has been some other strange behavior eg. Wingate configuration changed apparently on its own which I fixed by restoring backed up wingate registry values and one workstation can't find printers (the crashing machine is the server) which I haven't solved yet. If anyone can offer advice on diagnosing and repairing this instability I would appreciate it. I'm hoping to find something that works short of a full reinstall because I fear that could involve lots of time and peril in successfully recreating our environment. Thanks for your attention and consideration.