I'm partial to Slackware. Debian is also a good choice.
The last Linux install I did was Gentoo. It is not for newbies, but, you get one lean install after you are done.
You could try and uninstall the USB controllers in device manager and then do a restart to reinstall them. This could fix the problem.
Do any other USB devices give you problems?
That's the way they build them. They want you to buy new every cou0ple years and make it hard to upgrade anythiing. Not to mention they bundle all the software on a recovery disk and when you do a restore if everything isn't exactly as they put them the stuff will not reload. The last pre-built I bought was an IBM 486sx. The only way to go is build your own.
Years back there was a virus that would change icons randomly. It was a Win 95 virus and while it was annoying it didn't do any real damage. I haven't heard of this happening in XP, but, you never know. Might want to check for a virus.
I have seen this happen before when a box is a member of a domain. You could try and rejoin the domain and then set the drive for sharing. This should give you access to it again.
You can only install 2 drives per IDE channel. Motherboards have 2 IDE channels so you can only connect 2 drives to each. The only solution would be to add a PCI controller card and connect the 2 drives to it.
If your motherboard has raid functionality then you could connect your hard drives to the raid controller and configure a raid array and then connect your 2 other drives to the onboard IDE controller.
Make sure block wan request is disabled.
Set your server to listen on port 8080, open up that port in the router and see if you can connect. With the recent outbreak of new and modified worms some ISP that didn't block ports are doing so now. If you can connect on 8080 then 80 is probably blocked.
You might want to check and see if there is a new version of motherboard drivers. Could be the driver that Windows is loading isn't compaitible. Load the drivers off the motherboard cd or download them from Intel and try them out.
To increase PF:
Right click My Computer > Advanced tab > First settings button > Advanced tab > last option is to change PF size and choose which partition to put it on.
While I was researching this I found 2 possible solutions. One is to increase the pagefile and if possible to move it to another partition and to shutoff drive cache features. This one will more than likely work. Some people with the external firewire problem said it cleared up the problems.
The other was that this affected motherboards that used the Via chipset. Since you don't have a Via chipset then that is out.