4 Days of My Life...Gone!

Well the last 4 days have been absolute hell. Last Thursday my computer started to act a little funny. Things would take a long time to load, items would not close, little things I really did not pay much attention too. I have a up-to-date security system, Zone Alarm, that could find nothing more than a few tracking cookie's, so I was not concerned. On Friday I started to get Internet Explorer errors and would have to shut down every few hours or so. It was quite annoying, but I could still work. Then about 40 minutes into a very long survey, it did it again. I can't tell you how upset that made me. I am really surprised I still have a keyboard and a mouse to work with. So then I spent about 30 hours in the last 2 days trying to find the problem. Every 20 seconds or so Internet Explorer would encounter a problem and have to close. I even had to go to a friends house to research the problem on his computer because I could not use mine. To make a long story short, I finally had a friend of mine who is a tech guy for his company, help me with the problem. He has spent over 4 hours on it himself. He said it could be a virus that got by Zone Alarm by a way I did not understand, or he said it could be a quirk with Internet Explorer. Anyway, it is now running better, but still every so often I get the error again. I have a lot of work to get caught up on, and I just lost 4 days. Sorry for the lack of updates, I am hopefully back on track.