When I press the Reset button on the computer it loads properly and everything is OK. This happens every day. It seemed to start after the February Microsoft fixes (however, wouldn't swear to that). Is this probably just poorly written code by Microsoft or indicative of more serious trouble in my computer? Is there any remedy I can try or should I just wait for the March fixes from Microsoft?

I can't say what the cause might be but perhaps some clues might be found in XP's Event Viewer. Any system errors will be listed there. Go to: 'Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer'. Click on the lists and scroll them to look for errors. I won't necessarily know what listings in the logs mean but at least looking here could be a starting point in tracking down the problem.

Here are the items today listed as warnings or errors:

Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the SymWSC service.

The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load: nvport

The driver has detected that device \Device\Harddisk0\DR0 has predicted that it will fail. Immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent.

Detection of product '{00010409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}', feature 'HTMLSourceEditing' failed during request for component '{9E0B2BE1-DEDA-11D1-A17E-00A0C90AB50F}'

My C: drive is about one year old but I have my old drive (about 10 years old) also installed as a slave. That was done to speed up transferring over files to my new (present) computer. What is nvport?

Firstly, I would back up any work to your spare drive or a CD/DVD. Think about the validity of the 'disk' failure' message after that. If the disk does go wrong, you at least won't have lost everything. A disk can go wrong at any age.

nvport seems to be related to the nvidia video driver (Google search). Perhaps try reinstalling the driver. See what happens after that.

nvport can also be to do with malware, so scan the system with whatever security scanners are installed.