I keeping getting these wierd lockups on an NT machine.

NT 4.0 sp4. dual 350 mhz PII, with 256 megs ram.

The machine had been running fine, the problems started after I installed VisualStudio Professional 6.0.

Here's what happens. In any program, if I close a file that has changes, a sound gets played (part of the sound scheme), if the mouse is moving while this sound is playing, the machine freezes, and the mouse dissapears. Only way out is to power off or hit the reset switch. Nada in the event viewer about what happen, just a note that the last shut down was 'unexpected'.

Also, when this happens, IE 5.0 looses it's cache. Or at least appears to. On rebooting, when I start IE, it churns the disk for about 30 seconds and when it comes up, all visited links appear as unvisited, and any cached pages, images, etc... are gone.

Anybody have any ideas?