Lots of crashing lately with various programs
 

Lately I have been having program crashes, stop errors IIRC, while running XP.
I am using Norton 360, have run housecall, and malwarebytes. everything is clean.

Wondering what other things may be causing this.

I dunno squat about computers, but ....

Norton is the debbil.

Hardware. Fetch memtest and let it run overnight.

Wilco. Thanks.

My last puter acted like that before the motherboard died.

The list of suspects is quite long. You and you family do not have enough fingers and toes to count the many possible reasons. However that list quickly diminishes if you first provide hard facts.

For example, every stop error screen and critically important numbers and error text. The system (event) logs contain important facts. A tool so simple as to be sold even in Kmart reports voltages on four important wires. And if the computer is from the few better manufacturers, then comprehensive hardware diagnostics quickly take that large list of suspects down to but a few.

Answers will only be as useful as facts that you first provide. Examples of how to have better and immediate answers.

Grab a boot CD, run memtest, and run a few other hardware tests on there as well.

I've seen memory, firmware, and hardware take systems down hard. Lately, it's been firmware on my end.