When my pc is idle the light that indicates the hard drive is running/working won't stop flashing. What could be the problem...

not nescasarily a problem think of your computer like a human brain with shor term and long term memory ram is short hard drive is long to insure that it has enough short term memory to think sometimes windows uses hard drive space instead of ram if a process or program is loaded by the hard drive (this is what your pagefile.sys is) then while that process is running it will remain active... also some process may be using your hard drive like virus scanners and other system services without a benchmark as to the extent of activity it might or might not be something (most likely its nothing and your system is fine) but withour more input its hard to say hit cntrl-alt-del select task manager select tab performance stop doing anything for a few seconds you shouldns see more than 30% on the cpu usage under idle conditions... you can look at the history here to see if things were active when idle.....

Some defrag programs, such as diskeeper, will do a defrag in idle times depending on the settings. Please post back within 24 hours or I will delete the post from my follow up list. Thanks.

XP does an amazing amount of housekeeping chores and it accesses the hard drive on a pretty regular basis. Mine looks like a freaking disco light most times. I wouldn't fret about it. I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid...

with 1gig of memory, memory or pagefile should not be a issue. Come up in safe mode and wait until fully loaded. If the activity continues odds are it is system. If not then its something being loaded on the regular boot. Come up regular and start unloading apps/processes until you see the activity stop. Restart the app or process to see if the activity comes back to confirm the culprit. Another possibility is that you have some sort of trogan or spyware worm working away. You should do scans for both V and Spyware.

I have to agree with setishock on this one. When all four of my machines are running it's like it's Mardi Gras time.