Third PC problem in 1 month ... help !

Ok, it's not really a crash this time but it's a very serious problem and I don't know how to solve this one. Every move on the HD seems to last for ever. Starting or closing any kind of program is taking at least 10 times longer than before. I did scan for spyware with 4 different programs like Adware, Spybot, Ewido ... and all seems OK.
I used Norton Ghost to restore the whole systems but even this is not helping. Sometimes the HD is running hard when I'm not doing anything so go figure why it is doing this. So the one thing I can think of is that the HD is not working properly anymore.
Before buying and installing a new one I would like to ask you for your thoughts on this.

Thanks in advance.

Jos, it would be very hard to diagnose something like this remotely. It can be as simple as a cache file misconfiguration or it may be driver or hardware related. My best advice is to take it in to a PC technician and have them look at it and recommend a solution.

Guy

Jos, my hard drive has done the same thing on occasion, but somehow seems to settle back down on it's own. I would appreciate it if you would let us know what you find out about the problem and solution.

Would recommend going to a personal computer tech forum. Try turning off any spyware, virus software etc. If that helps then review your those application settings. Generally you will need to experiment more before a tech can assess what is going on. Move to your c: root folder. Try creating a file with just a few characters in Notepad, then saving it right there in c:. If that is still slow then your pc has something seriously wrong. Might be something corrupted in your hard drive that would require rebuilding your whole OS and system. If that is ok then try to do same but save the file in a different folder than where it was opened. If you have some more savvy computer skills run msconfig and one at a time try removing automatic loading of various non-critical aps at startup until you see a change. ...David

Update for Bill

- I did a system restore going back to October 2006 (no success)
- I had a ghost made with Norton Ghost dating from 2006 when the PC was clean and did a restore with this ( NO success, the restore didn't even work properly and asked me to do an integrity check. Didn't seem to help)

To night I'm going all the way and I'm going to format the HD and reinstall Win XP
If this does not help I will put the HD in some other PC to test it, if the problem occurs on the new PC than I will buy a new HD for my PC.
I will keep you informed on further action and solution.

You don't say if you're talking about an internal or external hard drive. I assume it's internal. But if you've got an external hard drive, make sure you're plugged into a USB 2.0 (or Firewire, if the drive allows) port, not USB 1.0. USB 1.0 is significantly slower than 2.0.

Brent, I'm talking about an internal drive. I also forgot to mention that there is 1G of RAM what should be enough to make everything work smoothly. There are two internal HD, one is used to make backups of my images. Yesterday I had a look at the HD connections and I did change the jumper from cable to master and slave but that didn't seem to make any difference the main HD is still running full speed even without me doing something on the PC.
On monday I will take the PC to the office and take out the HD and put it into another PC just to check that it isn't anything else that's going wrong. Thanks for the help !

I'm sure you have done this but have you opened task manager and look to see if a exe file is chewing up your CPU. I remember a while ago when Microcrap brought out Windows Defender the exe for that program was chewing the CPU like crazy, don't know if they fixed it with the latest beta, I deleted mt copy and wont use it again. It was all over the net of how it was chewing up over %80 CPU usage. Might be worth a look in the task manager.

Keith thanks for the input but finally the problem seems to be solved for now by reformatting the HD and reinstalling WinXP. There was something wrong when booting the PC and there was also some things not going wright with the registry. All this testing and reinstalling was done by a specialist at the office. So for now I will reinstall all the software I used to use before and see if the system keeps turning. If not I will replace the HD.
Thanks to everyone for trying to help me out here.

Did you run chkdsk on the drive?

I had this happen and I tried this -- unplugged all the external USB devices and rebooted -- problem gone, then I plugged them in one by one until I found the one that slowed it down.

Turned out to be an external hard drive, whichw as fine after chkdsk/f