HDD light slows PC performance

[Topper]

WINDOWS-XP home edition:
Hi there, When I go to WMI in the system tools dropdown list, it says that it, "Cannot access, files may be moved or missing". When I set it to readout the system's History, it says all files have been deleted on 02/25/03, but theres nothing significant about that date. No hardware or software changes and no problems were noted at that time either. Also, when I give the old "3 finger salute", (Ctl-Alt-Del), and the Task Manager pop's up, all the tabs
at the top, you know, Apps, networking, processes, users, are all
missing too. Its just a big gray blank square with no close buttons or anything. One more symptom is that when this happens, I also notice that the HDD light stays on constantly, and my DVD player disappears from my Directory tree. This slows the PC performance by about 50 percent or more. I have: 1)IBM 30G 7200rpm HDD NEW, 2)52XCD-ROM, 3)Creative 16XCD/RW NEW, 4)SAMSUNG DVD drive NEW. I've checked the drive ribbons and the jumper settings and they are all correct.
The weird thing is that this only happens about once, out of every five startup's. My PC runs just great either way, only slower when the HDD light is on. I've run Ad-aware and Spybot to look for and remove any crap software, but though it finds stuff, it has no effect on the system.
One thing that seems to stop it, is when I run Norton Disk Check, it says that the OS or another program has exclusive use of the HDD at this time. If I want to have the HDD scanned for errors and fixed, I must schedule a scan to happen on the next REBOOT. If I do it that way, then when the PC finishes rebooting and the scan runs, all bugs are gone and the HDD light is only on intermitently, and not constantly. Please help me with this problem. I have even resorted to upgrading my M'board/memory and cpu..... it's now a Asus A7V333/512mg of DDRram/1.8Ghz processor. I've carefully gone through every entry in the CMOS setup pages to be sure that all settings are correct and that anything in there that can be shut off to eliminate it as a possible problem has been done. This crap is still happening. I even Fdisked and Formatted my HDD, and reloaded WINXP and all software from scratch, with all the Service paks and hotfixes. I even flashed correctly, the newest BIOS to my brand new board. The problem, astoundingly is still rearing it's ugly head. I tell you this thing works just fine.........UNTIL that darn light comes on, and then all hell breaks loose, Thanks in advance, Gilly P.
(heyabbott@starspath.com)

[pam123]

Do you have the same trouble when the HDD is on the IDE by itself?

[Cricket]

Are you running any maintenance utility suite like Norton System Works?

What kind of programs do you have installed? Can you list the ones that are shown in the system tray by the clock.

Do you have MS Office installed? Is Find Fast enabled?

Cricket