Why so much hard disk activity when opening programs?

Diss · 28 Aug 2006 at 06:23

Hi

Recently whenever i open a program in winXP i get a long bout of disk activity before it opens - can't see any reason for this as cpu usage is normal and no obvious culprits. Once the prog is open it works fine.

Any idea's what might cause this and how to fix it?

thanks

Diss

Diss · 29 Aug 2006 at 16:48

thanks all

tried your suggestions but no luck

i then did some more digging and found a program called filemon which shows all files as they are accessed

turns out that Zone alarm (VSMON) is the problem - i had a very large .exe file (1.7gig) on my desktop that it checked through which caused all the activity - i thought this was specific to desktop but it also did it with another large .exe file that i had on a separate partition - both of these .exe files had very recently been used to install stuff

anyway, i deleted them and problem seems to have gone away - very odd

thanks

Diss