Any help with Trend Micro problem?

I have used Trend Micro's HouseCall for a couple of years with good results- finding malware,etc and speeding up my system. But for several days now I have gotten stuck trying to run it. It goes through the first couple of clicks, the when it says it is updating and transferring, it bogs down at about 1/3 of the way through the progress bar. I tried it on my laptop with the same result-the status bar says "17 items remaining". Just now I booted up in safe mode- same result. I really want to get my system faster. I know I don't have any virus- I have run adaware & spybot- clean. What could be slowing me down? I keep it defragged and keep the system restore points emptied. I really don't know what to do-I have XP with sp2-(I won't have sp3) 1g ram and 160g hd.Lots of unused hard drive space. Any help would be much appreciated. Also use AVG free ver8.