crisis over. i noticed that the things that were crashing were trying to connect to the internet. norton was trying to run live update, avg was trying to run its update process and mcaffee was also trying to connect. i manually uninstalled aol, by deleteing the folders and rummaging through the registry and deleted every aol reference i could find. after reboot the aol installer DID NOT crash, but i must have missed something because it asked me if i wanted to install over previous installation. as soon as aol was reinstalled, the other programs stopped crashing and i am now back to how i was. now i just need to purchase a decent graphics card.
thank you everybody for your help. wish i could have tried to install windows retail with oem key just to see if it worked

ps.connecting through windows at last