Scrolling, web page or Wordpad document, when holding the left mouse button while on the scroll bar, is extremely slow. Left clicking the scroll bar or using the mouse wheel within the page or document is imprecise, the page or doc. continuing to scroll for 1- 2 seconds after mouse button or wheel action stopped.
Occasional web pages seem to load differently - this has only been happening since the scrolling issue arose.
Disabling hardware acceleration at Display Properties fixes the aforementioned problems, but is hardly an ideal solution. Intermediate levels of hardware acceleration, between none and full, do not achieve this.
The OS is Win. XP Home Edit. SP1 and the graphics card is a GigaByte ATi Radeon 9200SE, 3 weeks old.
Any thoughts, advice on this matter would be appreciated.

I have seen this type of scrolling lag on many a machine. Most of them were woefully inadequate in power, but some just needed a few adjustments. Try updating your chipset drivers, then your vid card drivers. See if that fixes the problem.

New display drivers solved the problems.

Cool! Glad it worked! And thanx for posting back with your success. It always helps us to know what solutions fixed what problems, so that we can recommend that solution in the future.