OT: XP Home problems

["Graham Howe" <graham@xxxxxxx>]

I know I'm going to get no end of abuse for even daring to post about
problems with XP Home Edition, but here goes.

I had a call from a client last night about problems they were having
with their home pc (absolutely nothing to do with me, I just do their
website, but they think I 'know computers'....)

The beast in question is a shop bought (Tescos I believe) pc that cam
pre-installed with XP Home and up until very recently it has been
performing well. However over the past few days, sometimes when it
boots up everything looks fine in windows but none of the desktop
icons work. Other times the icons work but the whole of control panel
disappears, other times it completely refuses to connect to the
internet. Now if they could connect to the internet and if control
panel worked, I would get them to set up remote support and I'd have
a good look around, but I can't do that :-(

So does anyone have any idea what could be causing this, my immediate
thoughts were dodgy software installed (they claim no), fault with
processor or memory (no errors during startup and task manager shows
plenty of both even during the 'hung' state), disk fault (again no
errors and not a consistent fault), SNAFU for XP Home (most likely
but not the answer they want to hear).

I want to avoid going to see them as it will be the 'pop round for
five minutes' turning into several hours but equally it would do me
no harm to score a few brownie points with a fix.

Looking forward to the responses, especially the ones that don't
suggest XP Pro, Windows 2K, Linux, Mac or any other operating system
that might actually do what is described on the pack. Needless to
say, I have never and would never put the steaming pile of poo that
is XP Home anywhere near any of my own machines ;-)