Joe,
That is strange. I have a Dell Laptop, but am not using the same programs that you run. But so far everything that I have loaded into it to try has worked ok. It has XP Home on it as I have the XP Pro on my other computer and thought the Home version would be all I need on the Dell. I don't hardly ever use it any more.
Do you get any error messages or anything that could be used to track the problem or just what kind of failure does it have?
Ron