XP's services.exe won't stop writing to the disk

[anthonysw1]

The Summary pretty much says it all. I'm running Windows XP with Service Pack 1 (not 2) and when I pressed CTRL-ALT-DELETE and got the Task Manager to display I/O Writes (as suggested by another thread in this forum), the only service that continued to write to the disk after startup completed was services.exe

I'm assuming that refers to the Services list that's in Administrator Tools, but is there any way I can determine which service is causing the never-ending disk access?

Here's a couple of things that may be relevant:

1) The disk access is not a heavy-duty churning; the HDD blinks and the hard drive is accessed about every 1 second. But it's still annoying.

2) I recently installed and uninstalled Microsoft .NET because I was trying out ATI's new Catalyst Control Center, but I decided I didn't like it so I uninstalled both programs.

3) .NET was accessing the hard drive a lot, and in the hopes that it would stop, I disabled a few Windows Services that I thought I didn't need (like Universal Plug and Play & Remote Registry). Could that be causing the problem? My monkeying with the default settings of the Services list?

 

[Bovinicus]

You should make sure that services.exe is not Malware of some kind. Malicious programs are often named something that appears to be a valid system utility or resource, but it is actually playing around with your system.

 

[anthonysw1]

no, that's not it, because when you attempt to stop the "services.exe" process, Windows says it's critical system process and Task Manager cannot end it.

Besides, the computer in question isn't connected to the internet, so my risk of getting malware is a lot lower than normal.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Are you sure that what you are seeing, is not just the standard IDE activity light showing, when Windows' checks the CD-ROM drives for newly-inserted media, about once a second?

 

[Bucksnort]

Indexing service. Disable it in administrative tools, computer managment, services and applications. Stop indexing there then go disable the indexing service. Lastly right clik on your drive select properties and uncheck allow indexing of this drive.

 

[InlineFive]

That's malware. I just removed the exact same thing from my system. Follow Schadenfroh's directions in the Spyware thread in Software & Applications.

 

[watek]

I think it's normal. I see the same thing.