sorry if this is in wrong area. i was chatting on the aol software, then all of a sudden, someone signed off, then my computer started slowing down, all apps load so slow now, even web pages :s. but yet, my cpu usage is not any higher :s.
Check the amount of RAM you have available. Could be that you've run out for some reason, maybe a program had a memory leak and forced windows to start using pagefile.