Win95 running exceptionally slow; any ideas?

[Stan Allen]

Hi, gang - good ol' Windows95....it performed fine up until recently; the
only cause I could think of was the Internet Explorer update that was not
specifically listed as Win95 compatible....dumped it, and went to
Microsoft's Win95 site to get a version that was at least declared
compatible, but I'm seeing no improvement...it can take an hour or so for
the desktop to load, and then, of course, eons for any icons or buttons to
respond, rendering it all but worthless - the problem is - of course -
intermittent, and the ctrl-alt-delete shows the following items running in
the background:
Explorer
loadwc
realplay
Em_exec
Acrotray
Osa
Mmod
Rundll
Asp4tray
Pnpchk

I would have hoped that one of these would be the culprit, but shutting down
the individual items doesn't help, either.
Safe Mode seems to work normally, which is why I'm hoping the situation can
be fixed, but my tech skills have atrophied greatly since the dot-com bust.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

-Formerly capable tech