well, somehow my XP OS has been corrupted. Essentially, it pauses for about 10-15 minutes in between the black screen that says "Windows XP Home Edition" and the blue screen which boots the operating system up, leaving me to stare at a black screen for that period of time. I've tried updating windows, updating the operating system, and apparently I'm going to have to re-install. Do I have to back everything up on discs now? Grrrr.....

Have you tried booting into Safe Mode? You may find that you've simply got a driver for a peripheral that's corrupted. Do you have a lot of USB devices or something? Any new devices added?

Yeah, I have a lot of usb devices, it's never been a problem before.
The CPU always freezes regardless of what mode I boot in

do you have a disc in your cd/dvd drive? your bios might be thinking its a boot disc and taking some extra time to figure out its not. otherwise, i got nothing.

you can try to repair your xp installation short of reinstalling. boot your computer with the windows xp cd in the drive (there will probably be a prompt when you start that says "press any key to boot from CD"). in the installation screen that pops up, there will be an option to repair an existing installation of windows xp.
if that doesn't work, you can go ahead and reinstall windows without losing your files as long as you don't reformat the hard drive. however, you'll still have to reinstall most of your software, since all your registry settings will get wiped. if backing everything up is an option (especially with music) i would recommend it before you screw with any of it--i lost one of the greatest mp3 collections the world has ever known about three years ago while i was trying to fix some computer problems.