XP Pro locking up continually

Hey there. Long time lurker, first post.

I'm running Windows XP Pro Corporate SP2 on my laptop. Awhile ago, it started to randomly lock up. I didn't think much of it until it started happening frequently. My battery is dead, so I thought it might have something to do with my computer occasionally coming unplugged and shutting off hard, that perhaps my hard drive was failing as a result. I backed up all my files and went along with it. Starting a couple days ago, it would lock up within a minute of me powering on. This would only happen in normal mode, however. I ran a few tests and the drive came up fine. I scanned with malwarebytes came up with a couple cookies. Eventually, I noticed that it would lock up in safe mode with networking, but not plain old safe mode. I booted up in diagnostic mode, and there have been no problems. I tried turning off my wireless switch and disabling my wireless service, but it still locks up in normal mode. I've seen you guys help out a lot of people here, and as a tech at my school's IT department, I've checked this site very often when I run into a problem I don't know how to fix. I figure you guys might have some ideas.

Long story short, my internets are breaking my laptop. Help.

Have a look in the Event Viewer for any errors at the time your computer locks-up.

To open the Event Viewer go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer. Alternately, go to Start > Run and type in "eventvwr.msc" (without the quotes) and press Enter.

Check in all the categories.

If you find an error that occurred at the time right-click on it and select properties. Copy the information in the window and post it back here.

How To Use the Event Viewer

(butting in icon here)

Here is a method to post the specific information about individual events found in the Event Viewer.

To see the Event Viewer logs, click Start, Settings, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Event Viewer.

A shortcut to Event Viewer is to click Start, Run and in the box enter:

%SystemRoot%\system32\eventvwr.msc /s

Click OK to launch the Event Viewer.

The most interesting logs are usually the Application and System. Some logs may be almost or completely empty.
Not every event it a problem, some are informational messages that things are working okay and some are warnings.

Each event is sorted by Date and Time. Errors will have red Xs, Warnings will have yellow !s.
Information messages have white is. Not every Error or Warning event means there is a serious issue.
Some are excusable at startup time when Windows is booting. Try to find just the events at the date
and time around your problem.

If you double click an event, it will open a Properties windows with more information. On the right are
black up and down arrow buttons to scroll through the open events. The third button that looks like
two pages on top of each other is used to copy the event details to your Windows clipboard.

When you find an interesting event that occurred around the time of your issue, click the third button
under the up and down arrows to copy the details and then you can paste the details (right click, Paste
or CTRL-V) the detail text back here for analysis.

To get a fresh start on any Event Viewer log, you can choose to clear the log (backing up the log is offered),
then reproduce your issue, then look at just the events around the time of your issue.

I opened up the event viewer, but whenever I try to open a category, it just give me an error message:

Unable to complete operation on "Application". The interface is unknown.

This happens for each category.

Check your devices in Device Manager (Start > Run > type "devmgmt.msc" (without the quotes) and press Enter). Look for any "!", "?" or "X" symbols.

Didn't find any.

Have you tried reinstalling your network adapter driver?