Excessive Diak accessing

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Guest

Over the past week or two, I have noticed a lot of hard disk activitiy I did
not have before. I run XP and no changes other than updates have been made.
Several monitoring tools have not shown the problem but the Process Monitor
utility shows explorer.exe as the one doing all the read/writes, over and
over. Indexing is not on. Did an update make a change in disk activity for
some reason?

Thank you for any help. I'm tired of the activity!
 
There are a lot of sub-processes that run under Explorer, did you expand
Explorer and look at any of the sub-processes?

JS
 
It runs all the time. It reads and writes before and after any defrag. The
biggest user seems to be Explorer.EXE listed exactly that way using ProcMon
from MS. I googled that name and see there was a trojan with that name but it
is not on my PC.
 
These are listed as one line items using ProcMon. Most have a registry key
associated with a read or write cycle, always a little different. It's just
that it started recently (two weeks ago or so) and goes all the time. I may
uninstall the most recent update to see what happens. I'll wait for another
idea or two if possible.

Thanks for the response.
 
What if any virus detectors or spyware detectors are you using? If any, turn
them off and check.
 
At present I have pccillin and teatimer running though I stopped teatimer for
a short time to see if it was the problem. I also have the usual adaware,
etc., that are not running. A lot of the activity seems to be TCP related. I
shut down my internet connection using zonealarm but no change. Here is one
line from ProcMon.

6712 10:52:04.0445095
AM Explorer.EXE 1412 RegOpenKey HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\{A311788B-839D-4A37-AEB8-04CBBBF277BE} SUCCESS Desired
Access: Read
Notice the time with seconds in 7 decimal places. Make any sense? Thank you.
 
Have you clicked run--typed in MSCONFIG--and checked what services (service
tab) are running? I suspect you have
an anti virus or spyware constantly checking your system.
 
Yes, I used that earlier. I have added a couple of programs that monitor
processes on the PC but can find nothing common. Very odd. Usually, teatimer
is an active searcher but I shut it down and no change. Whatever it is, it
does seem to slow down the loading and starting of apps. As I said it is only
about the past two weeks that this has been going on. I have scans scheduled
for about every day for adware or spyware or viruses, etc. but nothing yet.

You are right about how it looks like an anti-something trying to protect
the system. I'll do some more cleaning up and see where that leaves me.
Thanks for your help.
 
I'm having the same problem, and it seems to be related to my antivirus
software, AVG. I can't find any way in the set up to control how its
scanning. It seems to be all or nothing. Is there something better I can use
and control?
 
Frankly, I think it either ZoneAlarm or PC-cillin doing the read/writes. It
is still going on but not as obvious to me now. I'll live with it.
 
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