Last night I figured out that it had been a loooonnnnggggg time since I did any disk maintenance. So, I figured I’d start with a simple defrag.
When I tried, I was informed that there were disk problems and to run Scandisk first. OK…
'Cept that took three hours with numerous message to the effect that some other program was writing to the disk and Scandisk was starting over. So, I went in and killed everything I could see that was running (using Ctrl-Alt-Del and “End Task”)
Eventually. both jobs got done, but the more I think about it, I think that there’s a bunch of stuff running that Windoze can’t see. Also, there’s a bunch of junk loading at startup that I can’t figure out how to cancel.
So - I need a good utility program to do some major reconstructive surgery. Once upon a time, I’d just have sprung for a copy of Norton, but after four years out of the Biz, I no longer know what’s good.
Any ideas?
I have Norton anti-virus, but what I use more are some free programs that I found out about on http://castlecops.com/forums.html - Ad-Aware, Spybot, and A-squared. They help. If you don’t like the awful bug-splat sound that Ad-Aware makes when it’s done you can change that to any .WAV file. A-squared takes a long time but it catches stuff the others don’t. Did I mention the price is right?? 
I would suggest re-running Scandisk, but after starting Window in Safe Mode. If I remember correctly, there are a couple of flavors of Safe Mode. Choose the one without networking. Basically, Safe Mode is a minimum Windows configuration that allows you do things like this.
From the help page, here’s the instructions for rebooting into Safe Mode:
To start the computer in safe mode
You should print these instructions before continuing. They will not be available after you shut your computer down in step 2.
Click Start, click Shut Down, and then, in the drop-down list, click Shut down.
In the Shut Down Windows dialog box, click Restart, and then click OK.
When you see the message Please select the operating system to start, press F8.
Use the arrow keys to highlight the appropriate safe mode option, and then press ENTER.