Problems with two computers (loading of pages)

Alright, I'm actually having two problems so I'll throw them out seperately.

Bit of background- I play MUD's... which if you have no idea what they are, think scrolling chat rooms with LOTS of people talking all at once. The key idea here is that the text scrolls by fast. Both computers have Windows XP.

Problem One- Brand new computer I built, 1 gig of ram, athlon 2400-m, everytime I open a new program, a new page, whatever. The page displays very very slowly. For instance, opening one program, the top bar will display, then it will flicker, then the bottom half will display, flicker some more before finally the whole page is displayed. We're talking about 5 seconds just to open up IE with the google.com homepage, or the search page, any new page. I've run Spybot and Adaware on both these computers so they should be clean.

Problem Two- Second computer, recently reformatted, Dell Dimension, 1.8ghz, 512 ram... when the text scrolls, it's like the whole window refreshes itself, the text will disappear and you can actually see the text moving up. Instead, it should just be smooth just like if you were typing in Word and advanced to the next line.

Thanks for any help!

 

fix for first computer

Hah, I figured out what was wrong with my first computer. PortAOL.exe, which is AOL 9.0's Port Magic software was using TEN THOUSAND GDI objects... after I closed that out, all my windows opened just perfectly. *mutters* Anyways, still working on the second computer, so let me know what you think.