ok, there are a bunch of little things i am wondering about, so i'll just list the symptoms and see if you wonderful people can give me some pointers.

1) for quite some time, in windows and linux, my screen gets fuzzy, and i have to move stuff around on the screen to get it to be clear again. is this a Hz problem, refresh rate perhaps?

2) my dvd-rom stopped working a while after i installed linux. it doesn't work on windows or linux. it may just be a hardware problem, but i'm wondering if it could have something to do with the lilo boot manager. does that boot up hardware devices?

3) xmms, at least when i'm using kde 3.0.2/3.0.3, seems to be very temperamental. sometimes, when i click on the playlist (mostly with a cd in the cd-rw drive, because my dvd-rom doesn't work) it likes to freeze my system. then when i ctrl+alt+backspace, X restarts, but it's so incredibly slow and takes so long to restart (the nvidia screen hangs, then ksplash hangs), that it's easier to just reboot the computer. does xmms do this a lot? should it do this? how might i fix it?

4) in general, if i leave linux running over night, or for any long period of time, it seems to get very sluggish loading basically any program. i have 256 MB or RAM, and a P4 1.3 GHz, so i wouldn't think it is my hardware. is this something with mandrake 8.2, or kde (i know kde is slow, but this is obnoxious). my memory listing at the moment is 61% free total memory, with most of it in swap. my physical memory is only 5% free though, even with 256 MB. are there perhaps some renegade programs that are running that i should shut down (using ctrl+esc, i can't tell what all of those programs are sometimes)?

ok...i think that's it for now. any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. also, i have mandrake 9.0 on the way, so i'm considering whiping my entrie hard drive clean and then reinstalling windows ME and mandrake 9, but i don't want to HAVE to do that if i can help it. anyway, thanks.

Ok, well I'll at least take on #2 with a guess:

If it's not working in either OS, and you are sure that the "other" OS has the programs installed correctly, and it used to work, then I'd say it's a dead drive. Check your BIOS and see if it's even getting recognized there. LILO might make it emulate SCSI in Linux depending on what your doing and things, but that wouldn't effect winbloze at all.

I'd have to say my best educated guess, the drive is dead or dying.

Cool

Before you do anything drastic like buy another, check the cables!

i have. i've checked all of the cables, and even replaced one of them just in case. the dvd-rom is recognized and there on both operating systems, but it won't read any media i place in the drive. when i put a disc in, the light blinks a couple times and that's it...nothing. so yeah, i've done everything i can think of....anything else i may have forgotten?