Winamp "freezes"

[slickassnot]

Hi,
after having used Winamp for almost ten years w/o problems, it's brought nothing but joy, now all of a sudden Winamp "freezes" and its process has to be killed in Taskmanager when I load more than, let's say, 100 songs into a previously empty playlist. When "frozen", that is completely unresponsive, Winamp looks like this:
[img=http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/820/winfreezejy8.th.jpg]
compared to the normal look:
[img=http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/3948/winfreeze2hh5.th.jpg]
Winamp becomes unresponsive and freezes even if I drag the slider at the left of the playlist up or down to see wat's in the list. Very strange, not to mention annoying.
And I am *not* giving up Winamp. The PC is a 3GHx P4 with 3GB RAM and, like I said, this is a new phenomenon. I have even reformatted the PC and reinstalled XP to try and fix it - no go. Please please please help! I am at wits end...