First let me say thank you for all your help and information that you 
have given me on this problem.
I followed the advise and ran scan disk from safe mode.  Everything 
appeared to be working fine, still had that 3.3gb fragment when 
finished, but everything was back up to speed and seemed to be working 
fine until this evening.  I am a hobby photographer and my picture files 
average around 28 mbs.  Normally the computer has no problem dealing 
with 2-3 of them being opened and working on them.  This evening I only 
had photoshop and 1 picture that I was working on and the screen started 
'whiteing' out except for the task bar and the top bar of photoshop and 
the system slowed to a crawl.  Does this mean that either my picture 
files or photoshop is part of that fragment?  How would I find out?  How 
do I tell if the hard drive is starting to go bad?  Recommendations?  
Advise?
Thanks in advance,
Regina Long
.............................................................
Hi,
I'm having something going on with my hard drive and was wondering if 
you could tell me what to do about it.  Saturday I uninstalled Microsoft 
office and then attempted to reinstall it.  It gave me an error and said 
that one of the installation files was already on my hard drive.  So per 
Microsoft I renamed the old file and installation proceeded normally.  I 
ran my Saturday maintence of spybot/windows update/etc. and then I 
defragged.  Thats when it came up with a 3.33 gb fragment.  It also 
showed that there were 29 other fragments of various sizes.  The 
computer during this time slowed to a crawl.  So today I thought I would 
rerun defragmenter and the results were that it gave me one huge 
fragment of 3.34 gb of owner\application.  I restarted and tried to run 
scan disk and it took 2 seconds and booted into windows.  Any ideas of 
what is going on here?  Suggestions on what to try?
Thanks in advance for your help,
Regina Long
Sapulpa
Windows XP Pro version 2002
112 GB hard drive
AMD athlon 64 Processor 4000+
2.39 GHz, 448 MB of Ram

              The NOSPIN Group is now offering Free PC Tech
                     support at our newest website:
                          http://freepctech.com