Netscape and Chat problem

Can any of you techies help me out? I came to chat last night and my computer kept stalling. This has been a recent problem for me on Netscape, even just while reading on the lists. Netscape "stops responding" every few minutes, and I can't do anything until it starts running again. During the chat, the page would just sit there forever, and then a whole bunch of stuff would appear. I tried participating twice, but my comments showed up waaaay after the subject had changed. I didn't used to have this problem, and I have already downloaded the Java stuff.

Today I did a disk clean up and a defrag. But Netscape is still cranky. I'm using Mozilla as an alternate, but I prefer Netscape. Their help people haven't responded. Have you encountered this problem, or is it something I need to take elsewhere?

Many thanks,
RamblingRose