windows xp home won't open any start options

[Jayrock523]

A friend of mine has a problem with his pc. I went over to take a look and I don't know what happened to his os.
When I start up his computer it takes forever to start up and then I press start and the options come up but if I press Help and Support it doesn't open, same with control panel or any of the other options. I press on my documents and it took forever to load up. I was thinking it's a memory problem but he said that it was fine and then like 3 days ago the problem started. When He had cable networking hooked up.
He told me his wife called the cable co tech and they had her deleting stuff.
He then re-installed Windows xp and the problem is still there.
I'm going to put more memory in, but has anyone run across a problem like this before, or know what it might be.

Please help.

 

[Rob22]

Try disconnecting the PC from the network(cable modem). It's possible that something is flooding his PC with packets or someone is launching a denial of service attack to that IP address.

If this works, then you might want to install a router in between the cable modem and the pc if you don't already have one.

If this doesn't work, try running either AdAware or SpyBot and also scan for viruses with Norton or the like.

What OS is he running? If it's NT based (XP or 2000), open task manager and see what's going on? Where is the processor utilization at idle? What is the memory usage? Check out the processes for all users and see if anything is hogging resources.

Rob22