I am having problems doing hd maintenance. Lately, when I try to run scandisk and defragmenter (*either one), it will start, run for a minute, and then reset. After 10 attempts, it will say that the operation was aborted because some program was trying to write to the disk. I recently installed zip magic, and was wondering if this could be the root of the problem. Any ideas?

Any program that writes to the disc will make it restart, this includes mouse movement. A screen saver trying to start will do that. Shut down everything except Taskbar and Explorer first and check your startup folder for running programs. In Scheduled Tasks, disable everything, esp Microsoft "critical update notification" and any MS Word programs like "Fast Find".

Mine scandisk sometimes gets messed up when the phone rings and the modem connects to the phoneline. Chauncey

I run scandisk from dos before windows is loaded

ergmiester has a point, but if you want to run it from windows you can make sure there aren't any other programmes running by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del and then end task until only Explorer and Systray left.

You may be on the right track thinking zip magic is the cause of your problem. I always had trouble running scandisk and defrag from windows, like you said it would restart over and over, so I prefer to run scandisk from dos on dual boot. I uninstalled zip magic because I like the way winzip handles unzipping better and the last time I ran scandisk from windows it actually finished. I never had attributed the problems to zip magic but it certainly could have been.