Weird XP Freezing Issue

I've been having some very weird problems with XP on my AOA150 recently. When I finish an install and get all the drivers working, along with all the usual software, then reboot, I find the Taskbar and the desktop unresponsive. In order to use the damned thing I have to quit explorer.exe, then restart it with task manager. After reinstalling again, I rebooted in between each install of a program, though now I think another problem popped up. Some programs (Like the games in Steam) crash a lot or fail to start. Chrome gives me the "Aw, Snap" page a lot and Firefox crashes and brings up the Mozilla crash reporter. Some sites work, though a ton of others crash it. IE 8 (Ironicly) seems to be the only one that works fine. Another problem is that when I come back from hibernation, the desktop is a solid colour until I move a window or start menu over it.

Just yesterday, A friend gave his netbook to me (AO250) since he was having a weird problem with booting (Unrelated to mine). I reinstalled Windows on there and took the drivers from the Acer Site and installed them along with a few select programs (Firefox, 7zip, Windows Live Messenger, VLC, Panda Cloud Antivirus). He just IMed me saying he has to restart explorer to get a working desktop... Weird! This could be the fault of my installation media, though for my netbook I used an old image I found on these forums ages ago, which just contains windows xp and the drivers, though accepts the key on the bottom of the laptop. To install XP on the friend's netbook, I used an old burned copy of Windows Fundamentals For Legacy PCs.