it's fixed!!! i think? i'll have to wait a little while to see the end results, but so far it is working okey-dokey. instead of doing a full reinstall, just installed xp on top of itself to fix the problem. after it was installed, i had to run avg (which took 2 hrs and 15 mins) but wound up not having any viruses/trojan horses. so all seems well. let's see how it goes. . .