[Vista 32] Performance Issues

[Drunkenup]

For the past week or so I've been trying to reinstall BF2 and have only gotten past 1.41 Patch (1.5 Setup doesn't show up even though I used it before I screwed BF2 up). During the past week my computer has experienced extreme slow downs and a few full system crash while installing BF2 and just plain Browsing and looking around with no intensive programs running. I've had explorer just freeze up completely at times when I ask of it (opening a window, closing something via toolbar, etc). Other applications have stopped responding completely at times, my Browser, Task manager, etc. After messing around to see if anything has been causing this, I noticed that my hard drive had been loosing space, quickly. One minute I had been 21.8 Gb of free space, then 21.6 a minute later. I emptied my Recycle Bin, to give me a good 2 gigs of space. Nope, 10 minutes later I was back to where it was before emptying. Now, I've googled this and found that people have had issues with loosing disk space because of something nicknamed "System Restore Bloat issue" where System Restore creates a abundance of restore points following the installation, removal, or modifications made to the Disk. I opened up System Restore, eventually (10 minutes maybe) it opened. I checked the available restore points and they were of the multiple uninstalls and installs and patching of my attempt to re-install BF2. I had nearly 20 restore points dating to about 5 days before this post. Now, that probably has fixed my loss of disk space. But no, it hadn't, I noticed that I had stopped Re-installing BF2 and its patches Thursday, yet up to today, my computer had continued to loose disk space (At a much lower rate), why of which I'm not sure, if its the bloat, its continuing a normal restore point saving pattern, or another problem is contributing to my continous disk space loss. My other issue is why am I getting such horrible performance on my computer? Is it the bloat, or something else?

Now my smaller issue is why the Setup for Patch 1.5 will not show up, Its process, BF2_1.5_Patch.exe stays at 56-60k for as long as I can stand (hours) while 1.41 took a matter of minutes. I have tried running it as and not as administrator, in compatability mode, and without, no success. I have not tried turning off UAC, but if suggested will try.

System Specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 1.8Ghz
3GB of RAM (factory)
ASUS P5LP-LE
EVGA Nvidia 9600 GSO 512 MB
Windows Vista Home Premium 32-Bit