Help with harddrive problem.

Factual Questions
1

Just today I noticed my hard drive started churning a bit. I dled the latest NAV defintions and ran a scan, did a Norton Quick Cleanup, and defragged my hard drive with Diskeeper. Afterwards, I still heard the drive being accessed in tiny blips even when I wasn’t doing anything for a minute or two. Just for kicks I ran the Norton Disk Doctor, but after it got through the first part of the test it stopped saying that something had access to the drive and would I like to schedule it later. I looked in the taskmanager and the only thing I saw that was new was the Diskeeper program that would autorun if the screensaver was up. I killed that process but NDD still gave me the same error message. Am I right in assuming that something is actively accessing my drive if NDD stopped? What might this be? Also, any comments on Diskeeper? I just dled a trial and heard good things about it but it seems a little odd that someone would need a nightly defrag.

My HD is still half empty and I run WinXP if that helps. The only recent installation was Mozilla Firebird and a couple extensions that I can’t imagine would have a reason to access the drive. I also installed the Diskeeper program but that was after I noticed this churning. Any help is appreciated.

2

It may be windows swamping your swap file.

How much RAM do you have, and are you running many windows services/autorun programs?

3

I’ve got 512 ram and disable virtually everything in the startup. The only thing I have running is Nprotect and the two CC’s associated with that and NAV. The only thing I can’t get rid of in the startup menu is Ghosts~2.exe - just can’t find anywhere to get rid of it. I have point32 for my mouse and one graphics card loader thing. I did check to see if indexing somehow got turned on and the box was checked in the properties, but it was unchecked at the Change windows components screen in Add/Remove programs.
Just as a test, I ran Norton Speed Disk and it wanted to reoptimize my whole hard drive. Speed Disk purports to put more frequently used files in optimum places on the HD. Isn’t that better than a pure defrag? Is Speed Disk better than Diskeeper because it also takes into account the frequency with which a program is accessed?