Agreed, Fragmentation refers to the condition of a disk in which files are divided into pieces scattered around the disk. Fragmentation occurs naturally when you use a disk frequently, creating, deleting, and modifying files. At some point, the operating system needs to store parts of a file in noncontiguous clusters. This is entirely invisible to users, but it can slow down the speed at which data is accessed because the disk drive must search through different parts of the disk to put together a single file, so defragmentation can not help you in this case.. Reinstallation of Windows XP with SP2 integrated will most probably fix this problem...if not then you have compatibility issue...