Hey, if you can see lots of icons in the bottom right hand side of the screen you may have too many programs and services running in the background. Use msconfig and kill all not needed programs and services from the startup configuration...see if that helps..
I would check and make sure it's not one of your spyware/antivirus programs causing the slowdown. When I was using spyware terminator, that was causing a noticable slowdown on the entire computer, when I uninstalled it, it fixed it.
