HDD Activity when idle?

Question

I have had this problem for months:

There is hard drive activity when nothing is running. From what I can tell, explorer.exe is issuing lots of page faults.

I have tried the following:

Running Filemon
Running Process Explorer
Turned off all startup items
Disabled NAV
Disabled communications
Disabled System Restore
Turned off indexing
Played around with different virtual memory sizes
Killed ceepwrsvc which had a lot of activity
Tried all kinds of things suggested in other tech forums

I have:
plenty of free disk space, 37GB
512MB of RAM

Thanks for any help.

When I disable stuff, it is only temporary, to see the effect on the HDD.
Have also run:
CC Cleaner
Zila Data Nucker
Ad-Aware
Spybot
MS Malicious Software T.tool
Internet Window Washer Tool

I run Firefox and routinely clear out all browsing history

Answer 1

Never mess with virtual memory for a start,
Never disable communications you could mess up your network/Internet settings
Never disable system restore, What will happen if your system goes down you will not be able to restore it.

Try disk clean up delete all your cookies. history .
defraging the hard drive,
you could have a hacker on your system unlikely tho

down load fire fox 2 web browser it is the most secure browser, set it up to delete all your cookies, history, and private data.... read the help files u'll find it easy

go to Mozilla.com