Think virus is gone, many thanks to all who helped out. Now onto the next issue!?

I mentioned in last week's virus attacks that if I have to restart the computer, it can be hours before I can boot the system up without having the mouse/cursor freeze up on me, 98% of the time at the blue Welcome page. If I try to boot in any safe mode, I get a bsod in ~2 seconds. If I try to boot from Last Known, or any of the other options, it freezes up. Other than the unknown amount of time from when this starts happening before I can actually get into my desktop w/o freezing up, I can't track down what is causing this. This has happened for years now. I've been told in the past that this could be a registry issue, but I've ran ccleaner, both to clean up and to address registry issues. I cannot get a consistent fix. Another correlation has occurred to me, tho...it seems like this issue likes to pop up whenever windows does an Automatic Updates (seriously, what is the percentage of any kind of update, on any operating system, or any application, for that matter, where the update works great right out of the gate, w/o needing any followup? Pretty damn low, I'd venture to say... Anyway, off my soapbox...) Now, in the past I seem to remember being told that this Automatic Update might be the issue. The update is geared to Windows 7, Vista, or some other os (xp personal here), but will make windows xp crash (or at least have significant problems). So, several thoughts...in control panel, automatic updates, it states that it would be bad (don't cross the streams, good safety tip, thanks egon) to turn automatic updates off. But if the updates are just going to frack up my computer, what in frack am I supposed to do? Has microsoft completely bailed on xp, a la throwing the baby out with the bath water? Are they trying to force people into 7 or Vista or whatever comes next by not only abandoning xp, but by actively programming updates that WILL NOT WORK in XP? I've tried looking into this through my cell, surfing forums, message boards and blogs, and I saw that a lot of people were having the same issues. Comically, however, everyone had a different way to correct the issue. No two were the same. And in some of these resources, the last time there was any activity at all was in 2002. So, here I sit again, after some seven hours, with an issue that has plagued me for years and a plethora of freshly created expletives. Finally, I got back to the desktop w/o freezing up. And then I get this. "Firefox.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close." Mother frackers. Again, surfed some more resources, have already uninstalled and re-installed Firefox, to no avail. Can someone please get me going in the right direction? Remember now, normally I don't turn the computer off when I'm finished...I put it in Hibernate, which does not reboot going back in. But any changes that will require Windows to restart, I'm right back at square one. The clock is ticking...just watching for the next Automatic Update. Waiting for that little box to pop up every 4 or 5 minutes, saying, "Windows will need a restart for updates to take affect. Would you like to restart now, or later?" Every 4 or 5 minutes. I'm about to cross the streams.