System not coming out of standby?

[InvaderFromMars]

I have Win2k, and a decent system hardware-wise. My system does not come out of stand by most of the time (75%), and I am forced to reboot/reset. 25% of the time it comes out of standby there are serious issues: for some reason system is super-slow and keeps getting slower, until after about 5 minutes after coming out of standby and then its unusable and I need to hard reset. (mouse pointer gets slower and slower, application won't open, and even start menu won't pop-up anymore).

Any ideas what could be causing this? Could this damage my hardware in any way?

[tain]

My first step in resolving standby/hibernation issues in Win2K is to remove all USB devices, reboot and try again.