So I just discovered that there was some kind of momentary breach of security on my computer - probably my bumbling sister - and my computer was suddenly flooded with spyware and other unwanted guests. As I killed off the last of them, I figured I would do a disk defrag since I'd just deleted a bunch of stuff. So I load up Diskeeper and it says I need to run CHKDSK because of inconsistencies in the drive. So I run it, fixes a bad link here and deletes a corrupt reference there, and I Analyze the drive for defrag. Chaos! My entire block of "Reserved system space" had relocated itself all the way to the other end of the drive, and a 20GB block of "Directories" had appeared out of nowhere! Since my "Reserved system space" left behind a gigantic hole of empty space when it moved, this is going to take FOREVER to fully defrag and I figured I'd do it overnight. What I want to know is, why on earth has this happened, does it indicate something's wrong, and has anyone else ever experienced something similar?

Hmmm (finger on chin).... If you are referring to the color-map that Diskeeper renders in it's defrag analysis I'm not sure I'd trust it - especially since you ran chkdsk between the two renderings. Chkdsk is fairly rigorous & reliable on the logic side of file structures & if it sez you're now good (and the drive isn't exibiting any odd behavior: sounds, performance) then letting defrag run ought to be worry-free. Defrag is physically hard as hell on drives. If the drive is old or huge you may want to defrag in several sessions by stopping/restarting again later. Or use a tool like sysinternal's Contig http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/contig.shtml which allows you to specify file(s) to process rather than doing the whole drive at once. I use it (and recommend it) to defrag my system partition at every shutdown: it's quick because the files never get a chance to get super fragged. I tested (on win2k) & did not like Executive Software's Diskeeper. Did you install it or did MS bundle it into XP as a replacement to their previous? G'luck!