Intermittent Stalling

I've been struggling with this problem for months.

Randomly my PC will stop all processing for approximately 4 seconds, then process for 1 second, then repeat this sequence until I reboot. It takes forever to restart with the 1 second bursts of processor. Even the "shut down taaadaaa" stops and starts playing until the shutdown is completed.

Windows patches are current, I've shut off the RAID mirror, changed memory, unhooked the internet connection, and run NBTSTAT when the problem is occuring. All for naught. Temperature is ~100 degrees.

My configuration is as follows:
IWill KK266-R MoBo, Athlon 900 MhZ, 384MB PC133 SDRAM, RAID mirror (2*Maxtor 20GB/7200/100ATA), ELSA Senergy II video card, Win98SE.

This problem seems to occur most frequently when the system is under heavy load. Photoshop 5, FrontPage, IE6, etc. and has happened 8 times in just the last 5 days.

The saga continues............... Any suggestions are welcomed.

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

Nbrskn I hope your temperature report is in Farenheit.

Have you scanned for a virus lately?

Will the problem develope even in Safe mode?

Tried trimming Start ups?

Run diagnostics on HDD?

Got plenty of HDD space?

Scandisk and Defrag.

Check swap file size. Perhaps delete *.swp in dos and let it rebuild.

I dunno...may be intermittent CPU failure.

 

I'm pretty anal about virus scanning, defrag, scandisk, etc. and do it nightly. Yup, temp is F. Start up's are about as few as possible. I've checked the HD with Maxtor diagnostics and I've got about 9GB open. I use a static swap file of 242MB although I just increased the size to 384MB based on your speculation.

Concering SAFE mode; can't do much in that mode as the network isn't connect and low monitor resolution won't allow any of the applications to run. (Photoshop)

I've considered a processor problem as well but as I only have a single AMD processor in my "inventory" I can't swap it without spending some $$$. IWill is about to replace the MoBo as the Southbridge chip is ATA66 instead of ATA100 like it was advertised. Maybe that will solve the problem but I'm not holding my breath.