I had already tried that, thanks -- no help. I really think the problem is that my hard drive may be starting to go out, and that is making my system a bit unstable. We shall see.
I have already had a friend at church copy my entire hard drive onto an external hard drive, just in case. Since I have not found any software online that would test the integrity of my hard drive, I am going to disconnect everything and take my computer over to a local computer store and see if they can test it -- of course there is always the chance that they will tell me its bad so they can sell me a new one, even if it is really ok. We shall see.
Specifically what makes me think it may be a hard drive problem is that I have to frequently use checkdisk to correct problems -- it comes up with missing orphan files being copied into the directory file and things like that.
Computer stores will charge too much for repair. Not a good idea.
Make CLONE of your hard disk, not copy all the files. Cloning is different. After cloning, install the new cloned disk and all should be fine (if the disk was the problem).