What I mean by that is the damn hard drive is constantly
running now. The system runs like an old Pentium 75, not
an AthlonXP 2400+.

System:
AthlonXP 2400+
512M RAM
80 GB Western Digital as master on primary IDE port (C:)
60 GB Maxtor as master on RAID port (D:)
DVD burners as primary and secondary drives on second IDE port (E: F:)

The problem started after this: I was burning a copy of
Midnight Run onto DVD, and my system rebooted for no
apparent reason. Ever since then, the hard drive has been
constantly running.

My thoughts are that the system is thrashing heavily, so I
set virtual memory to 0 and rebooted. This should have
gotten rid of the corrupted paging file. I defragged my C:
and D: drives. Now I just need to set up virtual memory
for 512MB. This equals main memory size, which is
recommended on systems with 512MB of memory or more.

Time to see if this cures my system.

BTW, this has happened once before, and after a period of
time my system went back to normal and the hard drive
access stopped - again, for no apparent reason. I hate
these problems that do not have obvious causes.