I noticed my hard drive light is now almost constantly on, no matter
if nothing is running, with just the desktop showing.

Doing CTL ALT DELETE I see all kinds of processes running, and tried
to look them up doing google search, but can't find anything that
I can recognize that might cause this. My laptop running the same
XP Professional doesn't do that, when you stop running programs the
hard drive activity light stops.

How can I find out what is causing this and remove it from my
system? I tried stopping various processes but am afraid to
terminate too many for fear of what might happen.

Would a list of the processes running in the Task Manager help
in diagnosing this problem? I'd hate to have to do a complete
re-install again, it takes days.

Thanks.

Jim