Emacs freezing up on Windows machine

[Chris Swoyer]

I am running GNU Emacs on a pretty good pentium 3 computer under
Windows XP Pro. Recently the screen started freezing or hanging now
and then (this isn't correlated with anything I can spot). It will
usually unfreeze after 30-60 seconds or so. Is there any likely
cause for this?  Would it be sensible to reinstall Emacs (I'd
rather not have to, but it's almost unusable as is, so would if it
were likely to help).

My Emacs: GNU Emacs 21.1.1 (i386-msvc-nt5.1.2.2600) of 2001-10-22 on buffy

Thanks for any thoughts,
CS