And check your Hard Drive health.

A near full drive or one that needs to be defragmented *may* be the problem...

Good idea to always have about 10 to 15% of the drive empty in order to have a bit of contiguous Temp space on the drive.

With XP, also check to make sure that the DMA for the hard drive did not get mistakenly turned off, leaving it running in (slow!) PIO mode as well.


--Mac