"Persist change" problem + computer slowing to a craw

[Treetop]

Hello All:

Every once in a while I hear alot of activity from the hard drive, the computer slows to a crawl and the A ball starts to turn occasionally. I don't know if its scanning my system or what is going on.  It keeps going until I get a Disk is Full error. Does it do automatic scans now or might something else be causing all this activity. It seems to only happen when online, I think. I have minimal things loaded, 12 processes. I updated and ran Ad-Aware and Spybot, just found some cookies and something related to IE,  (I use Mozilla), and deleted. Still doing it  I played around by turning all providers off and then back on again. Each time pressing yes to persist the changes. However when I reboot, all providers are disabled and I have to re-enable them. How do I keep them enabled? Any help much appreciated.

Win 98SE, 192 MB RAM, P2,  Avast Home 4.5.561, VPS 0502-2, Zonealarm

[MarcZ]

Go to the Avast Settings and find Confirmations and uncheck  the "Ask to persist change in resident status"

You could then "Pause Provider" instead of Stopping them

Disk Full ErrorsGoogle Search: disk is full error
http://www.google.com/search?q=disk+is+full+error

maybe

[Treetop]

Thanks. I unchecked the check and we'll try it.

Re: Disk is Full.
When the hard drive goes insane with activity, I was not performing any work prior. It feels like Avast is doing a scan?? I think all the resources are being eaten up and then I get disk is full message. I have 716MB free on this drive. Once it starts it takes forever just to open or close something, and the mouse barely moves. It just about locks up. Never had this problem before. It just started recently.

[Eddy]

Disk full message on Windows98(se) can also occure if there is data written at the end of the disk and Windows is not able to find a empty piece of diskspace large enough to hold the (temporary)file(s). If this is the case, defrag will solve it.

[Treetop]

Thanks Eddy. I did defrag and a thorough scandisk a couple of days ago. No errors.

[Eddy]

You say " no errors". Do you mean the problem is solved?

[Treetop]

No errors reported with scandisk. I figured I'd run defrag again and it appeared to do alot of re-organizing again. So I ran it yet a third time to see what would happen and re-organized most of the drive again. The Win98 SE version doesn't give you a percentage at the start of defrag as to how much it is defragmented. The older versions of defrag did. So I don't know whats up with that. Maybe it had to run a couple of times just to sort everything out, or it re-organizes differently from the older versions. I know with the older version when you run it a second consecutive time, it just zipped through the drive without re-organizing anything. I must admit that I hadn't defragged in a while, so maybe the drive was pretty messed up. Its been a couple of hours now with no hyper activity, so maybe I've fixed my problem and kudos to this wonderful forum.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Disk full message on Windows98(se) can also occure if there is data written at the end of the disk and Windows is not able to find a empty piece of diskspace large enough to hold the (temporary)file(s). If this is the case, defrag will solve it.

Contiguous space for temporary files is not required. 

[Hammer]

You better check the Zone Alarm support forum. I think there is an issue with the latest ZA updates and it seems to affect the true vector files where it's crashing peoples systems, and hogging all the cpu.

[Treetop]

It did it again after defragging again.

I was running an older version of Zonealarm because one of their updates was crashing. I'm going to try Ver 5.5 and see how that works. Anyhow, for the heck of it I ran Hijack This and it marked the first and third lines as "Nasty" (as identified on the auto-check, follow links thru these pages). I removed them and now there has been no hyper activity. So far, about 4 hours.

O4 - Startup: Microsoft Find Fast.lnk = C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\FINDFAST.EXE
O4 - Global Startup: ZoneAlarm.lnk = C:\Program Files\Zone Labs\ZoneAlarm\zonealarm.exe
O13 - WWW. Prefix: http://

[DavidR]

fastfind.exe is a know hog, permanently updating indexes to supposedly speed up document finds. It really isn't worth the trouble it causes in cpu/hdd activity, not to mention your av will also be working overtime as it indexes.

[Treetop]

Thanks. Anyone know what the WWW. entry is all about?

[RJARRRPCGP]

Also, there's likely spyware or adware installed.

[Eddy]

Anyone know what the WWW. entry is all about?

Sure I do. If you type in your browser eg:

mywebspace.com and the browser can't find it, it wil try www.mywebspace.com

as long as it only say www there, there is no problem. If there is anything else there it is not normal and should be fixed.

Click on the link in my signature and visit the HijackThis section for all the info you need/want.