Is there a program out there that monitors and identifies which processes are acessing the hard drive?

Question

My hard drive light comes on for long periods of time, even when all scanning programs are shut down (like antivirus, antispyware...), and what is even more baffling is that the system idle process reads at 99% ?

Answer 1

Sysinternal's Filemon (-> http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Filemon.html ) does what you want.

Answer 2

You already have a built in program called Task Manager. Just right click on an empty portion of the task bar (where the start button and clock are located), then click Task Manager. If you click on the Processes tab, you will see all the processes that are running at start up.

Even if you're not doing anything, the idle process is still a process so it's not unusual for it to consume 99% of the CPU. In the computer world, being idle is still doing something.