Hard Disk Drive very busy

[Replicant]

Lately I've been experiencing my HDD getting really busy, sound more like a geiger counter.  I have had it in the past and the only way to get rid of it was to go back to an earlier restore point.

So, I've run Adaware6, run Norton AV, deleted internet cache/history, temp files, old programs etc., defragged my drive but it still does it.  It's more annoying than a major peformance hit, although on system ID the CPU process hits 9% spikes every now and again even on idle.

Anyone have any ideas?

I'm running:

Athlon XP2800+
1 gig PC2700 DDR RAM
Win XP Home
SB Live
Radeon 9800 128mb
Kerio Personal Firewall
StopZilla popup blocker
37 gig HDD with 21 gig taken up (virtual memory set at 2048 - should I increase it?)

[Skuzzy]

First of all, shut down all unneeded programs, then take a look at the process list and note the CPU utilization.

It should be at 0 percent and stay there.  If it is not, then something is actually running in background.  Could be the source of the problem.
XP does this neat trick when an application has a bad memory pointer (NULL).  It will replace the NULL with a virtual address on the disk drive.  This will cause untold amounts of disk activity.

[Replicant]

I switch all normal programs down, apart from the firewall but I have so many of those 'host' thingys running should I shut any of those down?  I can't actually identify what's causing the activity, even if I switch one task down at a time.

StyleXP = Windows theme
ATi = taskbar icons?
Stopzilla = Pop up blocker
kpf4 = firewall
iTouch = keyboard shutcut utility
Cnxdsl = DSL
NAV = Norton Anti Virus
point32 = Intelimouse?
pstrip = PowerStrip graphics utility

Not sure about others.

[214thCavalier]

Nexx you need to visit this site,

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/utilities.shtml

It has some extremely useful utilities available.

EG

FileMon monitors and displays file system activity on a system in real-time.

And

The Process Explorer display consists of two sub-windows. The top window always shows a list of the currently active processes, including the names of their owning accounts.

I reckon they may help you.

[SLO]

I'm just amazed at how many processes you have on that display.....

[DipStick]

http://www.blackviper.com/index.html