blue screen of death + faulty USB?

[newslang]

hello,

have been having major troubles with what seems to be a hardware issue. whenever my comp starts up, and i open a few windows such as the firefox browser, the icon on the taskbar will hang, ie. the full title of the program i opened wouldn't appear correctly. when i open task manager, the cpu usage is stuck at 0%, the cursor is movable around the screen, but nothing is "clickable" anymore. when i select "restart" or "shut down" from the task manager, nothing happens.

then i reset the comp. it makes a beeping noise, then checks some IDE master/slave channels or something. then it usually hangs there, showing a blank screen.

sometimes when it actually starts up correctly, and everything starts to hang, i'll get the blue screen of death, stating that it's some driver problem. some guys at other forums tell me that it's a USB problem, but i have no idea how to get it fixed.

any help is appreciated. thanks.