My browsers are just all messed up these days...

[BTM]

I really don't know what's going on... at first it was just Mozilla that was giving me problems now it's BOTH MS Explorer and Mozilla.  They're being slow, I click on a new link and it just loads and loads, even when I hit Stop and then enter again and refresh it.  Sometimes when I open up a new, blank tab, cut and paste the link, it'll pop right up, and sometimes it just goes into an endless circlue of "connecting".  This seems to happen in particular when I try to click links on search engines.

I don't know what the problem is, I just upgraded my memory, so know I've got two Gigs (but I don't think it's a hardware problem.)  I've got AVG and Zone Alarm installed.  I did a scan with Spybot Search and Destory and it turned up nothing.  (Doing a full scan with AVG as we speak.)  I did a scan a defrag just a few weeks back, but maybe I'll try that again.

Does anyone have any thoughts what might be screwing things up?  Should I just reinstall both browsers and hope for the best?

(I'm on Windows XP, maybe that's the problem...)

Oh, forgot to mention, I'm on a cable modem, and, according to my internet provider, it's running pretty smoothly.  We did the whole "reboot the modem" thing yesterday.