low system resourses

last night i decided to de fragment my drive c. This appeared to have been successful, but when i tried to use my pc after this i ran into problems. Without having any programs opened if i click on an icon on my desktop all i get is the egg timer appearing but nothing happens. If i then press the ctrl alt del keys a message appears atating something like " system is very low on resources" please close programs. I tried swithching the pc on and off a couple of times but it makes no difference.
I'm running windows me along with free avg anti virus software and zone alarm. Unfortunately i'm not very computer literate so any help would be gratefully appreciated.

task manager

press ctrl + alt + delete and run task manager. Click on the processes tab. Click on mem usage so you can see the process thats using the most. Post the top 5 image names with their mem usage here.
You can try ending the processes one by one yourself starting with the one thats using the most (click on process and then end process. You wont be able to end them all as some of them will be system processes, but its usually a 3rd party process thats eating the mem.

Re: task manager

thanks car, I'm not quite sure why but the problem seems to be gone. Last night when I got home I turned on the pc again and found that everything worked apart from when trying to open up existing word files at which time the pc would freeze up.
However I could go into works and open up a new blank word document without problem.
Then when I would press ctrl + alt + del I got these mesages at various times.
1) the system is dangerousily low on resources.
2) winword has caused an error in user.exe
3) windows cannot find _ _ _ _ _.
I wasn't able to find the task manager as you suggested, is this feature available on Me ?
I did find in system properties the fact that I have 128 mb of ram and that "system resources were 61% free.
So to cut a long story short I reloaded word 2000 and found the same thing happening as I described above.
I turned off the pc and today when I turned it back on everything is working.

windows me

Must admit to not having worked on win ME.

I have found [broken link removed] helpful.