Ok, I went and shared my c:\windows directory and d:\ (Compaq recovery drive) to get my total nuber of shared files up to 3632 (1.45 GB). After the initial scan, I saw almost no hard drive activity. I saw a marked increase in CPU usage (probably due to searching) but not much extra resourse use. Less than 3 MB more than before, which means <1 K of RAM is used per indexed file.

If your hard drive is constantly grinding, tere are rwo reasons I can think of that this would be the case:

1) You are downloading one or more very large files (in the hundreds of megs) and they are nearing completion. At the end of a download, the segments that get put together are increasingly large, and copying a few hundred megs takes a while. I'll take this opportunity to echo the request made not long ago for FAT manipulation over filestream copying, it would be MUCH faster, and no extra HDD space would be needed.. though it may be a little harder to figure out and manage without bugs.

2) You have a very fast internet connection, have set your speed settings to 'Max', and someone else with a very fast connection is downloading lots of stuff from you. I dont' have a LAN so I can't be perfectly sure, but when downloading locally between BearShare and XoloX, XoloX would cause a lot more HDD grinding when sending files than BearShare does. (poor/nonexistant pre-buffering for sends?)