Can't seem to run scandisk as something is writing to disk. I have shutdown antivirus and winpatrol and screensaver but not zonealarm as I need that to stop internet activity. I think there maybe a hidden program running in the background but ad-aware and spybot haven't picked it up. Zonealarm says common client cc app is listening to a port but that is symantec so I guess it's safe, do you know if it is necessary though?

I can get hold of a copy of windows me, do you think that would be better than 98se?

One other thing, when you said run scandisk, did you mean standard or thorough?
Thanks for your help.