Any Win-Doze XP techie types on my friends list?

I'm experiencing an annoying problem I thought I'd throw out here and see if any of you have experienced and rectified similar.

My taskbar is sticking. I have it checked to run on top of other windows, and etc... and I don't auto hide it. I will hit my start button and it takes a few seconds to respond. And I'll move to another page and it also takes a few seconds to respond with the page I'm visiting in the taskbar. Everything takes a few seconds... like fifteen to twenty... to respond.

Also, in my systray, I'll click a few times before what I want responds.

It's mucho annoying. I've run my AntiVirus... all is well. I've run both SpyBot and AdAware and dumped any spyware that was hiding. I don't know what else to do.

Could it be I need to delete/burn to disc some of my files and stuff to free memory? I don't think I'm anywhere near touching full capacity here, though. I don't think I'm due for a full defrag, but would *that* even help?

EDIT:

Come to think of it, WHERE IS MY STATUS BAR? I have it checked to show and it isn't?

EDIT 2:

Gah! There's the status bar. I don't know... it just appeared. Like I said annoying. Everything is sticky and not responding quickly.