I have Vista Ultimate 32 bit installed on a home built computer. Everything was running fine until a couple of weeks ago. Computer started acting up, slowing down to almost nothing and slowly getting worse until explorer.exe would crash giving an error message. Don't have the exact message in front of me now but it was a reference error. The computer would start up and load fine and within 5 min would freeze up. Running in safe mode wasn't a problem.

Couldn't get much done and couldn't detect problems so reinstalled vista. Took all night to reinstall but when it was finished it was running smoothly. This lasted only a few days before the problems started up again. Again you only have about 5 min before it freezes up. Running in safe mode doesnt seem to bring any problems.

Could this be a hardware issue at all (HD or Mem) or do I possibly have a trojan or other virus that has remained with the old files and has come back?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, I'm at a bit of a loss here.