I've seen this problem dealt with but not completely explained or
solved. So I still need an answer to this:

System: Win 98se. AMD 2600+; Asus a78nx Deluxe. 256 MB mem.

Situation is this: I try to open a file in explorer that launches an
application associated with that file. Most of the times this works
fine, but some times there's a long delay, which can usually be solved
by killing the task in Ctrl-Alt-Del.

To launch the application manually and open the file from there works
fine but is of course not enough!

A similair problem is with Kazaa, starting this app USUALLY freezes
the computer for a few seconds.

Another problem which might be related is this:
When I try to open a picture (jpeg) file from Internet explorer, this
is supposed to launch Microsoft PhotoEditor. It worked before, but now
the program just starts with no file opened! And if I try to open the
file again from ie with the app already launched, it either works this
time, or it gives an error message (type not known or sth). So no I
need to save the file to my drive first, and then doubleclick it to
launch the app!

To prevent unecessary comments:
-------------------------------
This is not a harddrive or processor problem, they are not exhausted
in any way.

I'm already certain I have no viruses or spyware. And I have a pretty
good control of what applications I'm running at startup etc, so I
don't think they are the problem.

Best Regards,
Sebastian