help please, XPhome now constantly accessing hard drive, very slow

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

From: hal (xp_at_hamiltonlives.com)
Date: 02/25/04 

Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2004 06:37:49 -0800

I recently did some Norton clean ups on my Gateway desktop
running XP home. And by that, of course I mean that I
somehow screwed it up.

I tweaked the system a bit, and now the hard drive is
almost constantly being accessed, and my A drive (3.5)
gets checked regularly. The whole system is slow as mud,
and the process manager shows explorer.exe running huge,
my CPU often at 100% used, page file views at 500-800
megs, and in general slow as hell. It almost looks to my
uninformed eyes like there is an install hung up, and the
computer is searching for a missing component or
something. Defrag fails. Norton system works does not
detect any new errors, and the virus scan comes up clean
after being fully updated.

I'd be very grateful for any thoughts and suggestions from
the wizards out there.

hal
xp@hamiltonlives.com