JPEG imates, active desktop...

Hello all, recently (past couple of days) I have not been able to view JPEG images (or even the thumbnails, some of them show up in the file-shaped preview, looking like thumbnails) but I'm not able to view the full thumbnail or even the full picture.

and also my active desktop has been acting up (crashing), and the button on the active desktop recovery doesn't do a thing. any ideas?

Win XP Pro SP2
AMD 900 Mhz T-bird
ASUS K7M Mobo
256 MB RAM
2 (two) 60 Gb HDDs, both with barely 5 gigs used (NTFS)
GeCube Radeon 9200 SE 128mb (with impossible-to-find correct drivers)
Sound Blaster Live! 5.1
TCP 10/100 LAN/Network card
Cd rom/burner
Dvd rom
floppy
USB2.0
Saitek P2500 Rumble Gamepad
etc, etc, etc.


almost seems like it happened after I defragged the master HD.

any ideas?https://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2005/03/1.gif

*edit! I'm a firm believer in Mozilla Firefox! but I still have IE for windows update, and my compy is fully up-to-date

I swapped the GeCube Radeon 9200 SE 128 mb for the GeForce 4 MX 440 64 mb because the drivers are more reliable. I still can't view JPEG images that I have saved, except for right-clicking and having them open in Firefox. The windows slideshow and picture viewer will not even open...grr. and that was one of my favorite hobbies, looking up silly pictures and wallpapers, and also good offroad pictues.

The GF4 is a much more stable card, so I'm not dealing with as many crashes as I was with the GeCube. the whole JPEG thing is baffling me. it worked great a few days ago before I swapped my video cards out. any ideas?

I've updated/cleaned/fixed my registry, updated all drivers, updated all MS software through win. update, and I've tried everything that I can think of. I can view "my pictures" with Firefox, but not with Windows Pic & Fax viewer (the slideshow thingy). any idea how to re-install this? any idea to make sure that it is updated? I really need some help or suggestions, it's been well over 2 weeks now (since before the video card swap)