WinXP serious slowdown ??

I have a gateway laptop with Centrino 1.6, 512mb RAM & 60gb HDD (~12 gb
free) with XP Pro.

A coupla days ago, the system froze, so I did a hard reboot. While the
reboot, i immediately noticed how long the boot up took (especially on
the 'Windows XP Pro' with the scrolling bottom bar).

When I login, explorer.exe takes forever to load and here's the
strangest thing - when i load task manager, there are a ton of
processes (all accounted for, no spyware/virus/trojan), but none of
them have an owner. There are blanks in the "username" column. If I
give the system ~10-12min, eventually the columns fill up, but it's
weirdly disturbing.

When I try to play mpeg and avi files, there is a lot of jerking, both
audio and video, as if this was an old system. I know the files are
clean, and there's nothing memory intensive running on the system?!

I tried a chkdsk /r on restart - takes forever - I started at 1am, and
at 6am it was on step 5 "verifying free disk space", and when i checked
again at 8am, it was just stuck at 94%. I eventually just rebooted the
system, skipped the chkdsk and logged in.

Even tried a defrag - never went past '1% compacting files'
.....actually the first time I tried it, I started before I went to bed
- when I woke up 8 hours later, it was still stuck at 24%.

Any clues what's going wrong here??

.

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