I hate to state the obvious, but this is Windows ME. That vintage of Windows is notorious for needing to be rebooted often. When I was responsible for a stable of these beasts, I had machines that needed to be rebooted approximately every four hours to keep them running correctly, some once a day, and some actually survived a day or two between reboots. If you have broadband and are leaving the system powered up, you may need to reboot fairly often. In my experience, about the only thing that could materially change that frequent reboot was a clean install. Used to have to do it about once a year on most machines.