I am encountering a strange issue that I have never seen quite like this before. I noticed it first when I was downloading a torrent of Ubuntu to actually help someone else with their computer problem. utorrent gave me a "semaphore timeout period has expired" error. Semaphore errors tend to have to do with network issues but no other network issues had existed and this torrent was the only problem. Downloading to another drive allowed me to complete the download. When the semaphore error came up my computer started to hang/hiccup. The only way to fix it was to kill the utorrent process and about 30 seconds later everything was normal again. This continued to happen for this torrent until I changed the directory. Then yesterday I upgraded from Firefox 3.0.8 to 3.0.9 and it asked to restart Firefox. As it attempted to restart, nothing happened and then the hang/hiccup issue started. After I killed the Firefox process I tried to copy the whole Firefox directory in program files. It hung for at least 5 minutes on one particular file and then briefly on another but it eventually copied. I started Firefox from the new directory and all was well. I then deleted the old directory and copied the new directory back in. Then it worked just fine. Also, I tried running my weekly Spybot S&D scan and I got the following error over and over and over again for each bot check, "Access violation at address 00000000. Read of address 00000000." My conclusion is that someone is going on with my hard drive and not a networking issue at all. I suspect that there is maybe a bad section of my hard drive that can barely be read/written to. Any ideas anyone? How do I proceed? Do I just do a chkdsk? Is that safe to do in a situation like this? Thanks in advance.

Run checkdisk first and see what it finds, you can also download hard drive tools from the maker of your hard drive. If Seagate or WD they provide free tools for checking drives, I don't know about other brands. If drive errors found by makers tools, both the above will replace if still under warranty.

ok thanks. yeah i was concerned about running chkdsk on my system drive with it acting like this. part of me fears that running chkdsk will somehow think the files are corrupted even if it just takes a long time to read them and then delete them. and yes, i have a barracuda (seagate) and i got it in early 2008. so i'll give that a try. thanks.

If anyone is interested, the problem was a majorly corrupted MFT that was irreparable. I was able to, with much difficulty and time, pull off my important files (in tact nonetheless) and save them to another drive. Running chkdsk hung for literally over 5 hours at 9% verifying indexes. I gave up at that point and decided it was time to just format the drive and start fresh. format is chugging along right now on this big drive.