Hi Everyone.....this is not a terrible problem, just very annoying and I'm afraid it might be leading to something worse. First, the light on my pc tower ( the one that blinks when something is downloading) has been staying on all the time and only goes off when I touch the mouse to use the computer. Someone else told me this is normal for XP,that it's the disk defragmenter, but I've had this computer for 2 years and it's never done this up until a few weeks ago. Also, since that started happening, everytime I click on a desktop icon, it is very slow to come up. Once it does, the computer runs just as fast as always, pretty much. Normal for this computer is when I click on an icon, it's right there right away. Sometimes I have to click a couple times, even. ANy Ideas out there???????? Thanks

If you are referring to the hard drive activity light, then something is causing hard drive read/writes.

Have you added or changed your anti-virus or ant-spyware programs?
You could have an overactive scanning for malware. (check settings and logs for activity)

It could be another corrupted program or malware causing hard drive activity.
(shutdown all background programs or start in safe mode)

Could be your hard drive is failing. Hard drives constatnly correct themselves, when a bad sector of the drive is detected, the drives move the data and marks that sector as bad. If your drive is failing, sometimes it can cause this symptom. (run a hard drive diagnostic program)

Check those things and let us know.