It would seem the question to ask is does the computer freeze up during any other operation or activity? 

If not could it possibly have something to do with Facebook or the version of Adobe Flash?

The PC does well in every other task we use it for. I am thinking while playing the Facebook games there is just to much data being sent to the PC to process and not enough RAM to process to information or perhaps the hard drive is being to slow.

The flash version we have installed is the latest recommended install on all browsers.

It then very well may be not enough ram.

(Could be getting hot too.)

Could be a combination of RAM and video card and/or drivers.  You don't mention the video card, make or model, but by the sounds of it the vid card may also be the culprit.  Given its age it may not be up for such graphic intensive displays... but then it may just need a driver update.

Upgrading the RAM to around 2gb might help, but DDR2700 won't be cheap these days.... little or no demand for it.  I've got DDR2 800 in my rig and, here in Oz, find replacement/upgrade sticks almost twice the price of the newer DDR3 stuff.

It has that onboard video stuff Starkers. Perhaps I will search for a better driver later on tonight. As far as memory prices go I think I can get another 512 MB for the machine for around $40 dollars.

Dave - The fans are running fine and have all been blown free of dust.

Yeah, look into updating the drivers first, and if that doesn't help maybe a cheap video card could help.

I'm not too sure about US prices, but cards in the Nvidia upper 7x00 series - lower 8x00 series are around the $25 - $40 mark and relatively cheap here in Oz these days.  Similarly ranked ATI cards are comparatively priced, though and I reckon US priced might be a bit better, so it mightn't hurt to look into that also.... it would have to be big improvement on the current onboard stuff.

The RAM for $40 is pretty good, given what I've seen RAM prices do here in recent times... in some cases near tripling in price for older units.

Another thing you may want to look at is things running in the background.... check if there are any unnecessary items running that may be using memory that could be used elsewhere.

Starkers this machine does not have an AGP nor PCI-X slot. Just regular old PCI slots. I have turned off all unneeded background services already.

Does it have enough RAM allocated to video in the bios?  Not a lot of room to play with only 512 meg.  That would be something you might be able to bump up if you get more memory, you'd have to take a look at what it's got for real video memory and what the bios options are. 

Bugger!!!  There were some PCI video cards available some years back but I'm not sure if you could pick one up for a reasonable price these days, given the demand would be quite low since the advent of PCIE.  I actually have a Nvidia 4800GS that's PCI, but it's not much good to you here in OZ, is it.

Yeah, like Dave suggests, see if you can bump up the video RAM when you add the other stick, that may help some.

Depending on the model year kona the max ram you might get is 1 gb. Most Pentium 4's can handle that much. What you might want to consider is 'both' ram and the drivers/video card. I had an old eMachine and the differences between the two are minimal. One gigabyte was the most it could handle. Good luck with it.

Things to check for:

Any increased noise (especially a grinding sound) when you hit the problem area.  It could be failing sectors on a hard drive about to go. 

If the computer has had a lot of wear-and-tear--moved around a lot, sitting by a heat vent, dropped or banged into--you may need to reseat the memory modules and possible remove and reapply thermal paste to the CPU and re-attach the heat sink and fan.

Open the case when its running and look to see if the cooling fans are running, don't have broken blades and check the radiator-type heat sink under the fan over the cpu to see if it's full of dust.  Clean the dust out--while it is powered off and unplugged.

Most likely its the need for more memory and/or the hard drive.  Another possibility is a facebook related trojan/rootkit that's made it into the system.  Do you have a lot of facebook apps allowed for example?

I hear there is a lot of problems with the new IE browser and facebook. The ISP my GF uses recommended using Firefox and her issues disappeared.

Girls never wanted to get their hands dirty farming until farmville. Now they're all wanna be farmers. 

If it has the latest version of Flash but it's running Windows XP, perhaps that's the issue.

What I've found on this so far is more for multi-core CPU's running Windows XP and Flash, and these are more for video issues and Youtube related complaints than Facebook games.

One solution:

"Launch browser (IE for Firefox

Go to Task Manager

Click on the browser process.

Right click and Set Affinity

Un-Check every CPU except for the last one."

But that's for multi core. So let me see what else I can find.

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It looks like on some XP machines McAfee AV detects flash games as malicious attacks or intrusion attempts, and it freezes things (Whether it's just the browser or Windows entirely) when it tries to intervene, often before it can even get a message out.

To verifiy if it's a hard drive issue I'd recommend grabbing SeaTools or another free hard drive tester. Don't run anything that it says may damage your hard drive - you should be able to get a good idea from running the basic tests. But if it's the hard drive it wouldn't freeze up due to a single activity.

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Have you already tried completely uninstalling Flash and the subsequent plugins and reinstalling fresh to clear out possible upgrade leftover files? And have you checked your events logs to verify that there's not any errors occurring that Windows may be keeping track of for you?

One person had a similar issue on a Dell machine and rebooted to VGA mode through the F8 startup menu - They say that it fixed everything, proving that it was a video issue. Unfortunately, if it's onboard video, once it starts to go, it may be a sign of things to come as far as your motherboard is concerned. So while a PCI video card would fix things temporarily, if you see bulging capacitors when you pop the case, it's time for a replacement.

But the most common solution seems to be completely uninstalling and reinstalling Flash and its constituents.

http://get.adobe.com/shockwave/otherversions/

Guys thanks for the help. I have installed newer graphics drivers. Hopefully that fixes things until I can get some RAM and a new hard drive. However I don't have any system software for the machine so I will have to clone the drive. Not looking forward to paying for Norton Ghost. As far as the heatsink goes it's all clean. I will test the drive when I can. by the way I think the max memory I can have for the video is 8 MB.