I don't have any of the hardware drivers, but I guess as it's quite an old laptop, If I reinstall the current version of XP it should have suitable drivers.

I'll lose the Norton software, but that wasn't really working anymore anyway.

I will probably have to use system restore just to get my files off the machine though. Everything important was backed up, but the sum total of all the unimportant stuff would be a pain to lose. The alternative would be to extract the hardrive and put it into a caddy to plug into my desktop machine - I'm assuming this would be a bad idea though, in case any of the viruses were to propagate to my 'clean' machine.

It may just be coincidence, but Norton and spysweeper both stopped working properly since the problem began and I'm pretty sure that my version of windows isn't 64bit (the supposed reason why I can't install AVG anti-spyware). I also had to set up Spybot to do a proper scan as the default settings had been inversed (i.e. it was only looking for about 50 spybots and none of the other items). I wonder whatever is behind this had changed settings for all of these programs...

Thanks for all the help anyway, it's really useful to get guidance through this and try and learn how to deal with these problems