Outlook 2003, IE, and XP Explorer hanging up

First Outlook 2003 started to hang as soon as opened (no precipitating factor as far as I could tell) Then IE started same behaviouir and now I can’t even right-click on My Computer to see file list. Other Mozilla browser and email client is working. Excel is still working and QB is working. Have not reinstalled anything yet but did remove Google desktop search tool and the indexing function.

Running XP pro on a Dell Dimension X4, 3.12 GHz, 1 Gig RAM