Here is what I have done so far, followed by my questions to date:

I went through the cleaner/security/privacy applications, and nothing had a "clear the page file at shutdown" option checked. In fact, according to taskmgr nothing is running at shutdown. The computer just hangs at "windows is shutting down". I've tried letting it run for much longer than 10 minutes. Still have to use power button to shutdown.

I have 3gB of RAM. Right now the page file is set for 756 minimum and 1512 maximum. I did NOT change that, because I was a bit leery of making the numbers so much bigger and wanted to check with you to see what I should do, since I figured you weren't expecting me to have 3gB of RAM. Started with much less, but upgraded with two new sticks about a year ago, which really sped up my computer (at the time).

Fixed the sounds and audio devices so no sounds.

Too chicken to do anything to the CD burner for now.

I had already gone into msconfig and after hiding Microsoft Services, dissabled all the other services

After reading your instructions, Automatic Updates I fixed. Clipbook was already stop/disabled, as was error reporting service. Fast user switching I fixed.

I have a question about indexing services. Both the boxes in the generation tab were already unchecked. I unchecked the tracking tab box, and hit apply. Then under the indexing service + sign, all that was there was System, with 3 things showing on the right: system tools, storage, and services and applications.

Since I don't see any catalogs, I stopped here, for further instructions before proceeding...

Thanks again for your help!