Unusual Hard drive activity

[Leee]

Symptoms: About 3 or 4 times a day, when opening an application, my hard drive activity light will stay solid (on) for about 15-20 seconds causing the computer to freeze for that amount of time.  Usually the light will flash quickly when there is "normal" activity.  This has been happening for the last few months.

What I've already tried:  Defragging hard drives (which helped a little), Spyware check, Virus check and disc error check.

My Specs: Windows XP, Pentium 4 3.4Ghz, 1024mb ram,   C: Drive - Seagate 250GB   D: Drive - Maxtor 80GB
(each hard drive is less than 50% full)

If anyone knows what might be causing these freezes, I'd appreciate any suggestions.

[Flame]

Have you made any changes to your system just before this started?

Flame

[GX1_Man]

Check your running processes. There may be somehing happening in he background you are unaware of and don't want. What are you using for spyware/adware/virus protection?

[Leee]

Check your running processes. There may be somehing happening in he background you are unaware of and don't want. What are you using for spyware/adware/virus protection?

I thought of that and checked it as well, problem is there are so many processes running (about 30) and they all have obscure names that I really don't even know what they are for.  
But it seems to only happen when I first open an application.  And I really thought it was because the disk needed defragmenting.  As I said that helped a little but it still happens only for a slightly shorter duration.

One thing I noticed was that on the Hard drive defragmenting chart (with the blue, red, green and white clusters) was that there is a huge white (free space) gap in between two large blue blocks.  And I'm wondering if that might have anything to do with the problem.  I would think all the contigous files should be all together.

And I've made a few changes to my system but I honestly can't remember when the trouble began.  I added a new hard drive, I added a new external DVD burner and added several new programs. I have AnyDVD,  Microsoft Anti-Spyware, AVG antivirus, Zone Alarm, all running in the background.

I guess I'll try shutting down all the background programs and see if that makes a difference.

[GX1_Man]

Try Ewido (free trial) and see what's up with it.

http://www.ewido.net/en/


You may also want to run Hijack This and post the log file for careful analysis.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download3155.html


I don't think the free space would account for this.

[Leee]

Well I figured it out, and the solution was very bizzare, but at least it worked.  And I'll post what I did just in case someone has a similar problem or could figure out why this happened.

As I mentioned I tried all the normal scanning for viruses, adware, spyware, etc.  But I knew I needed a utility program that actually showed what was going on with the hard drive in real time.  The Windows Task Manager processes list is just too long and obscure to tell me what was going on.

So, I finally found some freeware called Filemon http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Filemon.html that shows a running real time list of what programs, files and directories are using the hard drive.  What I discovered was kind of strange....

(Below is a sample of the print out, these lines actually went on and on and on, probably close to 100. Note that vsmon.exe was the file that was reading this file)

12706      5:49:10 PM      vsmon.exe:1800      READ      D:\aatemp\HOMEDESIGNSUITEPLATINUM-1-WIN-US2.EXE      SUCCESS      Offset: 851968 Length: 32768      
12707      5:49:10 PM      vsmon.exe:1800      READ      D:\aatemp\HOMEDESIGNSUITEPLATINUM-1-WIN-US2.EXE      SUCCESS      Offset: 884736 Length: 32768      
12708      5:49:10 PM      vsmon.exe:1800      READ      D:\aatemp\HOMEDESIGNSUITEPLATINUM-1-WIN-US2.EXE      SUCCESS      Offset: 917504 Length: 32768      
12709      5:49:10 PM      vsmon.exe:1800      READ      D:\aatemp\HOMEDESIGNSUITEPLATINUM-1-WIN-US2.EXE      SUCCESS      Offset: 950272 Length: 32768      
12710      5:49:10 PM      vsmon.exe:1800      READ      D:\aatemp\HOMEDESIGNSUITEPLATINUM-1-WIN-US2.EXE      SUCCESS      Offset: 983040 Length: 32768      
12711      5:49:10 PM      vsmon.exe:1800      READ      D:\aatemp\HOMEDESIGNSUITEPLATINUM-1-WIN-US2.EXE      SUCCESS      Offset: 1015808 Length: 32768      
12712      5:49:10 PM      vsmon.exe:1800      READ      D:\aatemp\HOMEDESIGNSUITEPLATINUM-1-WIN-US2.EXE      SUCCESS      Offset: 1048576 Length: 32768      
12713      5:49:10 PM      vsmon.exe:1800      READ      D:\aatemp\HOMEDESIGNSUITEPLATINUM-1-WIN-US2.EXE      SUCCESS      Offset: 1081344 Length: 32768      
12714      5:49:10 PM      vsmon.exe:1800      READ      D:\aatemp\HOMEDESIGNSUITEPLATINUM-1-WIN-US2.EXE      SUCCESS      Offset: 1114112 Length: 32768      
12715      5:49:10 PM      vsmon.exe:1800      READ      D:\aatemp\HOMEDESIGNSUITEPLATINUM-1-WIN-US2.EXE      SUCCESS      Offset: 1146880 Length: 32768

I have a directory on my computer to store downloaded files, mostly consisting of EXE setup files.  There was one for a Home Designer software that I paid and downloaded (no warez) from the companies site.  I discovered that the hard drive was looking at that file, over and over again, along with a couple of other EXE setup files and just bogging down my computer for about a minute before anything else happened.

I burned all those temp files to a DVD, deleted them, and now everything is running very quickly and smoothly.
I just don't understand how a setup file in an obscure directory on my D drive "D://aatemp" would be accessing the hard drive.  But there you have.  That little utility program finally saved me from weeks of intense frustration.

thanks again for your advice,
Leee

[GX1_Man]

That is strange, but glad you are up and running again.