At 12:49 AM 01/20/2000 , Marc Guise wrote:
>Hi All
>My computer has recently begun to access/scan the floppy drive at startup
>and randomly for periods of  5-10 seconds. I have tried a clean Windows 98
>startup (no TSR's except Explorer and Systray) without any effect. The
>drive is scanned (violently interrogated, actually) as the Windows GUI is
>being displayed and at other random times, although these are rare (no
>specific program connected to these times).  In Safe Mode the same thing
>occurs, although the scan time is around 10 -15 secs.
>I have the BIOS set to A,C,SCSI.
>I've not made any changes to the system setup before this occurred, but I
>have installed Cleansweep 4.0. I did disable the Cleansweep TSR's, but as I
>said before, no change. I also swapped the drive with a known good floppy,
>same result. I remember something about random floppy access by Windows,
>but naturally didn't pay attention then because I didn't need it. Any ideas?

This is from an article on this subject I wrote some time back, these are the
most often culprits of this problem:

1) Clear out the documents menu.

2) Clear Unwanted Entries from the Start Menu's Run Command.

3) Edit and remove the "LocalLoadHigh=1" from your MSDOS.SYS file

4) Check for any viruses on your system (NEUVILLE virus will cause this issue)

5) Check HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/CLSID in the Registry for any references to
OCX's or DLL's referenced on the floppy.

6) Double-click on the System icon in Control panel, choose the Device
Manager tab, and delete the GENERIC FLOPPY DISK entry (found under Disk drives).
When Windows restarts, it'll re-detect the drive and the problem should go away.

7) Remove Corel WordPerfect's Quick Indexer from the Startup folder.

8) Remove Microsoft's Find Fast from the Startup folder.

      Bob Wright
The NOSPIN Group

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