Hi,
Process Explorer will give you a better idea of what your processes are than the taskmanager (i.e. it will tell you which services each instance of svchost is running.) You are most likely running some unneccesary windows services, windows does this by default. Disabling some of them (using the tweak Guide TheMamba posted) will make your computer run faster; but this doesn't seem to be the source of your problem -- these services would have already been running when your compter was acting normally.
I do have a suspicion that your problem is hardware related, in which case i won't be of much help. But just to make sure on the software end maybey you could post a Hijack This log and a start up list. Thes sometimes show things that are hiding from windows.
Here is a link with the programs and an explanation of how to use them.
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