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I have solved this issue on my laptop. Here's what I did on this Win2K machine: ctrl-alt-delete and then brought up the task manager. I selected the processes tab, then I chose "select columns..." under the view menu, and checked "I/O Read" and "I/O Write". I found that there were three processes that were incrementing I/O read/writes every second-- lsass.exe, csrss.exe and ESPMAIN.exe. The first two are windows OS processes that had been mentioned in many of the newsgroup postings, the third looked suspiciously like some scanner software that I don't use any more ("Epson Smart Panel"). I killed the ESPMAIN.exe process and, bingo, problem solved. lsass.exe and csrss.exe still increment, but far less often, and I'm not driven crazy by a once-a-second HD access noise. I looked in my startup folder and sure enough a Epson Smart Panel shortcut was there. Only now it isn't, cuz I deleted it... In my newsgroup searches on this issue I saw a lot of reports of lsass.exe and/or csrss.exe as being the culprits of constant I/O read/writes. In my case, it appears that another process was causing these two Windows processes to read/write to the HD...maybe this is the case for others experiencing this problem as well? hope this has been a help- Ben