Sorry to interupt here, but I use Photoshop everyday, and I get the "Not Responding" in the top bar (where it says Photoshop" and in the task bar) frequently. Usually, I just give it a minute to finish what ever it's doing, and then continue working. It'll say "not responding" all day, but it works fine. Unless it's locked up for more than 5 minutes or so, don't force it to shut down. Just give it a chance to catch up, and then hopefully it'll be fine. You may want to adjust your preference settings to use 85% of your ram, and put your scratch disk on one seperate from windows (another drive is possible, if you have 2 hdd's).
Photoshop does not have a built in save feature. You should always save, and save often, and don't be afraid to save as "picture 1", "picture 2", "picture 3" etc. This will give you the option of going back to a previous picture, if you've messed something up, or made a change and saved it, then you didn't like the change...kind of like a history of saved files so to speak.
Again, sorry for interupting, I just wanted to offer my 2 cents

Please keep working with
Orange Blossom, as I believe that she's doing a great job, and might be thinking of somethat that I had missed (she's better with xp then I am!).