After I restart my computer, explorer is fine for a while. then after an unknown amount of time or due to an unknown reason, i can't access my computer without the flashlight coming up and searching for the drives for at least 5 minutes. also if I'm using any other program to exlpore to my computer (the open button on microsoft word, etc) the same thing happens. however, when I click on my computer, i can go to the address bar and type where i want to go (for example: c:\program files) and it'll work. there are no viruses or spyware on my computer, as I have checked with numerous different softwares. for "just in case" reasons, i have 2 hard drives, c and e, a cdrw at d, and a floppy at a. everything boots off of c, and e is just for multimedia. thanks for any help!!

Not 100% sure about this but there seems to be some sort of delay when you access your HDD. Have you set the jumpers to disable Autospin on the back of the HDD? Worth a try I suppose!

i'll check it out, thanks for the suggestion! any other suggestions would be helpeful just in case

Right-click on the taskbar and open Task Manager. Click the top of the column labelled CPU. Click again if necessary so that the process using the most CPU time is at the top of the list. What process is it? Now click the Mem Usage column and again bring the process using the most memory to the top: what is it? Report back here and let's see...

explorer is at top for memory, at 30,556, and system idle process at 98% of cpu...thanks for helping...

When the flashlight appears, what are the top processes under CPU and memory? It does sound a bit like an IO problem, except that you can navigate directly when the path is supplied... Can you cd to a problem folder without delay using a DOS shell? Also try Start->Run, then type explorer c:\problem_folder Keep an eye on the CPU and Memory stats when doing this. Does any particular process hog your resources for more than a second or two?

nope, the system resources say the same