My computer is shitting bricks

Maybe it's just because I'm running on an install of Windows XP that's almost 5 years old. I know Windows' stability tends to degrade with age for some really weird reason.

That still doesn't explain what keeps happening.

This time it happened while I was playing Guild Wars. I'd previously begun the process of turning the graphics back up to see what the minimum I could run it at was, but I hadn't touched the graphics settings since logging on. All of a sudden the lag hit. At first I was sure it was a Comcast issue because my ping times were through the roof, but then it just froze. At a very slow pace I was able to get back to Windows and end it. Also killed Firefox, thinking that was the problem. But no, my computer had entered the "shit bricks" state.

There was literally no memory left, the task manager didn't show anything with an abnormally high memory usage, and the memory usage numbers didn't add up.

I dunno what caused the problem, but rebooting fixed it. I also took the opportunity on reboot to go on a startup programs cleaning crusade, wherein I went into the registry and killed a bunch of stuff from HKLM\Microsoft\Windows\Run and HKCU\Microsoft\Windows\Run that completely didn't need to be running at startup. Most of it came from Logitech's QuickCam program, which doesn't have a configuration option to make it not run at startup. I really only need it when I'm actually using the webcam, which isn't often since the webcam technically belongs to my dad and I have to go gank it whenever I want to use it.

Also my TweakUI has stopped working properly. I even reinstalled it, and it didn't magically start working again. I've made some changes to which icon should be used for a bunch of different video files (since CCCP's install process felt the need to change them for me when I updated it a while back) and I can't tell it to repair the explorer icon cache without it crashing.

Also another thing that bothers me is that every now and then I'll be typing in here and the cursor will just go away. I'll be in the middle of a sentence and I'll have to click back in the text box to keep typing. It's not just on blogger because Flash games lose mouse/keyboard focus every now and then. Sometimes it's predictable, like if I'm watching something on GameTrailers, their flash player exhibits the oddity of not going fullscreen when you hit fullscreen, but instead resizing to fit the browser window. So naturally I fullscreen Firefox before watching a video. However, when it comes time to un-fullscreen the flash player (by hitting escape), I just hear "STOP! Hammertime!" instead of it getting smaller. This only happens if I mouse over the scroll bar in Firefox while I have the player fullscreened so the mouse pointer isn't in the way. While it's funny to hear "STOP! Hammertime!" instead of what I'd actually wanted to happen happening, it gets annoying.

And if you don't understand why my browser goes "STOP! Hammertime!" when I hit escape, then you didn't read my previous post.

So I'm posting about my computer shitting bricks so that when it does it the next time I can have some idea of how often it happens.

Also I neglected to notice that my car's inspection expired at the end of February. Oops. Hope I don't get seen by a cop driving to get it inspected.