Although safe mode is one of the "sure-fire" ways of getting around scandisk and defrag restart issues, some items can still be running that cause problems.
First of all, do a CTRL-ALT-DEL in safe mode and make sure "nothing" but explorer is listed there (that's right, get rid of Systray too). Turn your screensaver off. Turn any power-save options off. Try a scandisk standard and then a scandisk thorough to make sure there aren't any problems on the drive.
If that still doesn't help, go to Start->Run, type msconfig, hit OK, and disable everything on the startup tab. Reboot back into safe mode and try again. At this point, there should be no system process interfering.
Note: It is not necessary to disable virtual memory (page file). Defragmenter identifies the swap file area and does not allow that to interfere. As a matter of fact, having no swapfile can actually cause "more" problems and cause it to run painfully slow.
~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884
