cant see anything in 'my computer'

Hi,
I'm hoping to help out a friend with his PC, so here goes,
he has windows xp on a Pentium 4 with 256mb RAM
problems are,
booting up we see c:\windows\system32\dfrg.msc
and sometimes
Sah. Agent.exe.xmlparse.dll
PC is very very slow
we can't see/access any of the icons (hard drives, cd drives etc) in the my
computer folder. It looks empty.
the CPU is constantly running at 100%
trying to access system restore freezes the PC as does trying to open up a
jpeg in my documents
he has only recently installed a firewall (he thought as he was on dialup he
was safe!)
he has nortons antivirus which doesn't detect anything...
can we fix this without a complete install?
(he has a lot of family pics on his pc and I am not sure if the cdrw is
accessible)

thank you for your time
Homer

First, be sure your antivirus software has the latest definitions and run a
virus scan.

Also, download, install and run Ad Awa
www.lavasoftusa.com

--
Michael Solomon MS-MVP
Windows Shell/User
Backup is a PC User's Best Friend
DTS-L.Org: http://www.dts-l.org/

"homer" wrote in message
...
Hi,
I'm hoping to help out a friend with his PC, so here goes,
he has windows xp on a Pentium 4 with 256mb RAM
problems are,
booting up we see c:\windows\system32\dfrg.msc
and sometimes
Sah. Agent.exe.xmlparse.dll
PC is very very slow
we can't see/access any of the icons (hard drives, cd drives etc) in the
my computer folder. It looks empty.
the CPU is constantly running at 100%
trying to access system restore freezes the PC as does trying to open up a
jpeg in my documents
he has only recently installed a firewall (he thought as he was on dialup
he was safe!)
he has nortons antivirus which doesn't detect anything...
can we fix this without a complete install?
(he has a lot of family pics on his pc and I am not sure if the cdrw is
accessible)

thank you for your time
Homer