Is it safe to assume that Avast! pretty much continuously accesses the hard drive while it operates? I ask because I've noticed punctuated HDD chatter on my brand new system (Intel Core2 Quad 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, Windows XP SP2), even when it should be idle. By that, I mean there is low-level seeking activity, which did not occur when I first got the system (about two weeks ago), that never seems to go away. I have defragmented my hard drive multiple times, shut off Windows indexing, and run AV and malware scans with a half dozen applications, all of which have come back clean. If there's an infection on my system, it's buried so deep that Avast!, Kaspersky, Trend Micro, AdAware, Spybot, and Uniblue can't find it. Avast! is the only AV actually resident on my machine (the other scans were run online), and I do not run any other security software in the background except PeerGuardian 2. So I figure the source of the chatter has to be Avast! I can think of no other explanation. Which leads me to the next question: Is it possible to tweak Avast! to stop the drive chatter? The rest of my system is virtually silent, and the constant noise of the HDD seeking is driving me crazy.