I ran spybotS&D, scandisk, and a few other things, and lappy appears better than before, but not completely back to normal. I found the utility I used to use with 95, "WinTop", and it shows IE is the bottleneck. (However, things used to be slow even without IE up, but I cannot recreate that so far.) I run Mozilla more now, but some sites only work with IE. Perhaps it is time to download a (fat) IE upgrade. Thanks for the suggestions.
BTW, why don't antivirus packs check for spybots and adware?