Right clicking "Save Picture" causes PC to slow.

I run a 512MB Dell Dimension 4700 with 250GB SATA drive and a first-year
version of Windows XP Pro. The disk was recently reformatted and XP reloaded
very nicely and has all updates and Norton Antivirus is current.

When I try to save an image from a web page , I right click on it, select
"Save Picture As", and the "Save Picture" window opens while the Page File
size jumps from 250MB to 820MB within a couple seconds and the PC slows to a
near standstill. I don't actually press the "save" button. I've just run a
default "Disk Cleanup" with no improvement. Rebooting gets the PC running
again.

When the disk was first reformatted, I could "right click" web page images
without problem. The problem appears to have started after I called up a
100MB scanned bmp image into memory, and then tried to rotate the image a
couple degrees using my Photodex CompuPic photo editor. It just kept
crunching numbers, so after a half hour I unplugged the PC and it rebooted
fine. CompuPic still runs fine, too.

Ever since then, simply opening the "Save Picture" window causes the hard
drive light to flicker and the PC to slow to a near stop. CPU useage is 1%
to 5% during the stall, so the processor is not working hard.

I suspect the "Page File" parameter is messed up, but I don't understand
much about that item. Is there an easy fix?

Thanks,
Dave.