System hangs then D/Cs

I play POE on two separate machines and this problem just popped up this weekend on my machine running XP.

I play for about 10 mins or so and then the my whole system hangs for about 5 seconds and then comes back. All programs lock up (i play windowed with 2 monitors) and then come back. About half the time I do this POE D/Cs from the server and I have to log back in.

The strange part is that the hangs persist AFTER I close the game until I restart. My system never hangs until I play POE on it. I am going to try to reinstall and see if that fixes it. Very strange problem.

So far not have had this problem on my Win 7 machine.