I've tried a couple Anti Viruses everytime I seem to have a problem with the P2P applications. I can't pay for an anti virus.

There's alot of free anti viruses out there, pal.

download AVG for your anti virus, and Spybot for your anti spyware. with Spybot, make sure you activate the immunisation. these are both free programs.

if your computer is slow, you might as well check out my speed up computer guide. the link is in my sig.

Try AVG, Avast or Clam AV / Clam Win... as far as I know, there a free versions of them available.

If you want to get your computer scanned, though, there are two pages that can do it, one on Symantec (makes Norton AV), and one on Kaspersky.

A virus is teh most likely cause of a slowdown, although depending on the number of addons installed on Firefox, it could slow it, right the hell down.

If your downloading on P2P, then it is mainly a firewall that affects your speed on that, so you can either add exceptions for the connections for them, or just close the firewall down, whilst your downloading.

Although they can slow down your connection, it is recommended that you have it installed, to increase security... most aren't really a huge hog on resources anyway.

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A virus is teh most likely cause of a slowdown, although depending on the number of addons installed on Firefox, it could slow it, right the hell down.

actually, its not viruses, but spyware that will slow your system down. while viruses can still do that, spyware is much more common. and its not the add ons on firefox that slow it down. its the actual program. it has always had a memory issue, using several hundreds of megabytes of RAM. a lighter alternative browser to firefox is Opera or Chrome.

how many processes are you running, and sorted by memory usage, what are the top five processes?

yeah its about as much as mine uses. i run XP with 768 megs of RAM and a pentium 4 3.0 Ghz. thats a normal'ish amount for your circumstances (regarding firefox). how much RAM does svchost use? and whats ares?

Ares is a file sharing program.

thats fine, so why are you having an issue here? and what was your total number of processes? the normal amount is around 30.