Thanks for that....it turns out there are a number of errors in the event log this morning to do with the hard disk and bad blocks...it is still running and I think its time for extra urgent backups!
I didn't realise Windows XP would hide such errors away.... I am guessing they only surfaced (no pun intended) cos I tried to defragment the volume... I use DriveSnapshot for backups (disk image to exernal disk)...I wonder if anyone reckons its better to do that before or after doing a surface scan with CHKDSK etc? John I had a very similar problem on my work computer once, and it turned out it was a corrupted/damaged hard drive. The HD was thrashing as windows was running Scandisk behind the sceens, and other things would take ages as it would attempt to reread data from the HD (Which sometimes worked on my machine, and some times did not). If this is what is causeing your problem you should see errors on your system event log with somthing about bad sectors. Regards Ben Vaughan _______________________________________________ Delphi mailing list [email protected] http://ns3.123.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi
