I got a Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz processor, 2 GB ram desktop. Its been about 13 Months since i bought it and has been working perfectly fine. Today morning it was working fine when I switched it on again in the afternoon it was taking lot of time to respond. On the logon screen it took about two mins to enter my password. After that another 2 mins to log in.

I have ESET NOD32 smart security and it did not start and instead gave an error. "Cannot contact Kernel" or something along those lines. The PC has been extremely slow and takes forever to respond. My HDD read light is continuously on.

I tried system restore and it took about 10 mins to shutdown automatically for restore and since restore whenever i log in it takes same amount of time and the HDD light in still on. But now a new problem, i don't see the desktop...possibly explorer.exe not starting.

Please help, possibly without reinstalling XP. I got dual boot with Vista so i could possibly get my C: drive data. But would hate to reinstall.