Thanks for your reply! No, I don't think there is something specific related to Vipre, it was the only thing that had changed by me directly (not counting updates) that was new before this issue popped up so I disabled it to see if that was it and it wasn't, unless I need to completely remove it but I haven't gotten to that stage yet. So I'll probably do as you suggest and remove it completely to see if that changes anything. I'll simply make a restore point and then uninstall it as opposed to your idea of going to a point before it was installed just in case something else happened at about the same time that is causing this. Trying to be systemactic about troubleshooting this one...
Thanks for the Avast suggestion, but I actually switched from that to this paid version only because of the amount of resources it uses are much less from what I've read/experienced so I thought I'd give it a shot and I do like it so far. But if I find this is related to Vipre I have no problem switching back to Avast on this computer as I will still use Vipre on my other two XP boxes.