Why do you even have that many?

Before i took over, the guy created a new web  app per request. So
right off the bat 15 web apps  were created for each of our 15
departments and then everytime they requested a new site....he then
created a new webapp.

We are new to sharepoint  and it wasnt till i attended schooling i
found out that its much cleaner to keep everything under a few web
apps.

Each web  application can routinely require about 200MB of RAM. It would be very
easy for your machine to run out of memory  very quickly in this scenario.

Check your hotfixes for .net framework 2

I had exactly this the other day

If you go into add remove programs and tick the tock box  to show hot fixes
you'll probably notice that there's only one installed - it should be KB928365 -
if you uninstall that you should be fine

You can read about this on various blogs - one such is at
www.msdner.net/.../328-1201-2105496.shtm