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...and Calypso/Courier... but using either leaves a lot to be desired.

I have been having this problem on my Inspiron ever since I installed SP2. I have tried a lot of things, and I highly suggest http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm for tweaking your services settings.
Another way to boost your speed is hanging your Prefetch setting, http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6270_11-5165773.h tml has a great article on how to do it.
TCPOptimizer http://darkedge.levels4you.com/review.l4y?file=20 also helped speed up my collection a lot.
Another cool tip is fixing Event ID 4226 which limits your connections in SP2, check it out at http://www.lvllord.de/?url=tools#4226patch.
And, of course get the MS TweakUI for XP at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/power toys/xppowertoys.mspx.
And although they are not freeware I actually bought and really like Registry First Aid http://www.rosecitysoftware.com/reg1aid/ and Registry Compactor http://www.rosecitysoftware.com/RegistryCompactor/ .

I hope you all have as much success as I have with spedding up XP. It is a pain in the butt to do it, but it is worth it in the end.

I have been having this problem on my Inspiron ever since I installed SP2. I have tried a lot of things, and I highly suggest http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm for tweaking your services settings.
Another way to boost your speed is hanging your Prefetch setting, http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6270_11-5165773.h tml has a great article on how to do it.
TCPOptimizer http://darkedge.levels4you.com/review.l4y?file=20 also helped speed up my collection a lot.
Another cool tip is fixing Event ID 4226 which limits your connections in SP2, check it out at http://www.lvllord.de/?url=tools#4226patch.
And, of course get the MS TweakUI for XP at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/power toys/xppowertoys.mspx.
And although they are not freeware I actually bought and really like Registry First Aid http://www.rosecitysoftware.com/reg1aid/ and Registry Compactor http://www.rosecitysoftware.com/RegistryCompactor/ .

I hope you all have as much success as I have with spedding up XP. It is a pain in the butt to do it, but it is worth it in the end.

are all y'all nuts? Reinstalling the OS once a month or even once a year? Holy shit! My current box is 4 years old and I've never reinstalled the OS and hope I never have to.

Once a month I consider rather excessive, but for a Windows box, reinstalling at least once a year greatly reduces the kruft. After a clean install, you can feel the improved responsiveness.

Anyway, my list of the first ten (+1 x2):

0) Turn off half of the default Windows crap (services, the recycle bin, CD autostart, etc), and perform assorted registry tweaks to stop Windows from acting like a crippled DOS-box-with-GUI (ala Win95) with only 64MB of RAM (such as LargeSystemCache, NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate, CompletionChar, and DisablePagingExecutive).
1) PageDefrag, which keeps your registry and pagefile in a single contiguous file (though you should always have your min and max pagefile the same, so that doesn't get fragmented in the first place).
2) AntiVir. No sane person goes without an AV program, and IMO, this counts as the best of the free ones (for that matter, I consider it better than Norton as well - Slightly more awkward autoupdates, but it doesn't hog system resources). Best of all, as a non-USian program, it doesn't deliberately ignore "official" virii such as the FBI's Magic Lantern.
3) AdAware. We all know what it does.
4) SpyBot. Ditto, and it catches some things that AdAware doesn't (and vice-versa).
5) Mozilla, of course.
6) Winamp. I still prefer the v2.x series, but, gotta have at least one of them.
7) TeraTerm Pro and TeraTerm SSH. Technically two installs, but only a moron would use unencrypted telnet these days.
8) Calypso, a really nice (and free-as-in-beer) email program. Want the latest, greatest features in your email program, making it all but indistinguishable from a full-featured web browser and media player? Don't use this. Want a safe medium for text communication, with fairly powerful regexp filtering? You'll consider Calypso a godsend.
9) The GIMP. 'nuff said.
10) Finally, a compiler (or three... The next dozen installs after this one would include various other dev tools). Currently I still prefer Borland C 5.02, sadly not free. Although advancing technoology has already made it basically obsolete, it has what I consider the most straightforward IDE of any development suite out there.
0, part 2) Repeat step 0, since by this point Windows will have tried to undo half of my changes from the first time.

Okay. Ego-post of the day done.

suggestions for best non-outlook email program?

Actually, I take part of that back. The company that developed Calypso, MCS Dallas, no longer supports it, but out of curiousity I did a bit of searching around, and it looks like Rose City Software does now. Their page looks a little... unprofessional, however.