I'd get rid on the Norton completely to start with and replace it with something like free.avg.com which I see you have it too. Which may be part of your problem.

Lots of problems when two virus programs exist. Probably when Norton expired it may still be active - using old out of date virus protection probably. That proxy is a norton/symatech updater.

Here is a link that might be useful: Might read this for Nortons proxy thing

I dumped Norton about 2 months ago. You can go to their site and download the uninstaller. Beware it does not clear everything. I use Regseeker to clean my register. I clicked on install programs and the Norton updater was still there and trying to update. I clicked to remove it and have not had any problems with Norton since then

Go here for Norton Uinstaller
Norton Uninstaller

The next part does the same as Ccleaner.
To clean out unwanted files.
Start - Control Panel - Internet Options open -
Delete cookies, Delete files (select all off-line content) - Click OK to Exit.

Then go to Start - Run - Enter %temp% - Click OK - Click Edit - Click Select All - Delete.

Start - Run-
Enter - C:\windows\temp - OK - and select everything except
temporary internet files, cookies and history folders and delete them.
Then Restart your computer

Thanks all. Will start working on your suggestions -- if I can get the computer working okay.

Last night I left the room for about an hour while Housecall ran. When I returned I again had a black screen with the nasty message "No IDE fixed drive present."

Several attempts to reboot failed. So I left to await your combined brilliance.

One of my questions still unanswered is about the option to "compress old files" after I ran Disk Cleanup.

Should I go ahead and compress/delete those old files? I can't imagine why that's so large -- it lists 521,665K.
Are they just temp files? Or something else?

Compress Old Files doesn't delete any files from the drive. It compresses files that Windows hasn't accessed for a specified period of time.
I have 2,597,426.
You can check everything in disk cleanup, won't hurt anything.

You've got more serious problems with the "No IDE fixed drive present"
It means the computer is not seeing a hard drive.
If you can ever get it to boot again, open My Computer, right click Local Disk (C:) / Properties, click the Tools Tab, under error checking/check now, put a check in both boxes and start. Hopefully that might fix something.

To me it sounds like the hard drive has died or the ide ribbon has come loose from the hd.

Randy,

After my last post, my husband said that he had been able to get online this morning and go to eBay even though the computer was "still running very slow." So the thing isn't dead, at least not yet.

I won't be able to get back to the computer until later today. But will certainly do what you suggested.

I had wondered about a possible loose connection to the hard drive as the cause for the erratic behavior of booting one time, but not later.

I haven't opened the case in a *long* time. Could dust also cause some of this erratic behavior?

I thought about a loose ribbon cable either at the hard drive end or motherboard end, but then it shouldn't work at all.
I tend to think it is a bad sector on the hard drive where the data can't be read, since the message came on a defrag and while doing the housecall scan which would check all files.

Running the recovery of bad sectors on the c drive/ properties/ tools should push all the bad sectors to the back of the harddrive and move the data to good sectors.

Okay, will do that first.

Sad ending. (sigh)
Never had a chance to try any of your suggested fixes. Next time I turned the computer on, message said
"Smart Hard Drive detects imminent failure. Backup and replace drive."

Ha! It didn't allow an opportunity to do a backup! Just repeatedly circled back to that same nasty message. (Good thing the drive didn't have anything of importance.)

So, thanks to all, for helping as much as you could. I truly appreciate your time and effort.