This is probably one of the first P4 with terrible performance - not much better than your PIII 700 (yes!)PIV 1.8GHz with only 256MB of RAM
But it's very hard to say what is wrong with so few facts
I believe Merlwiz will start on a Elyssa xfce - lets hope that'll happen
(Remember that the Community editions cannot be guaranteed to progress - except the KDE which i treated almost as the main)