Browser Hanging, Processes with Network Activity Dropping

I have been dealing with a balky system for about two weeks. Some of the symptoms pointed to overheating, and flaky RAM. I purchased and installed an upgraded CPU fan which trimmed 15 degrees Celsius off the CPU which is good, but no great improvement.

I replaced and tripled the amount of RAM from 8Gb to 24Gb, better, but not perfect. The problem I am having now is that in using my Chrome browser, it will become unresponsive. I open IE and it is the same. I have been keeping Resource Monitor open and I notice under "Processes with Network Activity" that the number of processes suddenly drops to about 4-5 processes from 14 processes. If it recovers on its own, which it occasionally does, and the number of processes grows back up to around 14, the problem seems to clear.

My machine is attached via cable to my cable modem at 100 Mbps. My internet connection is 30/50 Mbps. I have another machine sitting right next to it which is Windows 7 Enterprise x64, connected wirelessly, which is having no problems whatsoever. If I shut off the LAN card and turn on my wireless adaptor, it doesn't change anything. Re-booting seems to make things happen again, for a while, but that is hardly a solution. Any suggestions?

Thanks for the welcome.

I do believe I have the latest drivers, but I will try your suggestion to create a different user account and give that a try.

Well, I created the new user and it has been running well for most of the day until....

Just got a repeat of the behavior. Processed drop to 4-5, then it looks like it recovers as a whole bunch of new processes spring into action, only to have them shortly disappear.

Although the machine says the driver is up to date for this network card (Realtek RTL81XX PCI-E), I think I located a later version that I am going to try.

It appears that Outlook also hangs, Dropbox, right now after the other changes I made I would say it is those apps that use the Internet. So far the new driver seems to be holding up.

I just hung again as the number of network activities fell off to around 4-5 again. Re-booted. Any suggestions?

Once again, the network processes dropped off and Chrome hung. Had to re-boot to get it going.

I have deleted the old User ID, as I have not had a compelling reason to go back to it. I have kept the old files which I will delete in a few days if I don't find a need for anything, like templates. I also deleted the user ID I created to help copy over files from the old ID to the New ID