[Disk Defragmenter]

I do my maintenance religiously,i feel thts what keeps the system performing at its best for as long as its destined to survive- a defrag (I Use Diskeeper Pro) a disk cleanup, chkdsk, regualr virus scans/spyware scans and also a registry cleaner.

Talking of defrag, i feel the HD sizes have grown so huge nowadays but so has the average file size and i notice from just browsing sessions, so many files get dumped into the system. Also we download updates and patches etc etc, for which MS suggests a defrag everytime. What i like bout the defragger are the scheduling features too..great for daily defrag, uses very less system resources.

[Win xp themes]

does the zip file contain *.theme file ? if so just go to display properties, click on themes tab. In the themes dropdown list , click on browse and then choose the *.theme file from the location. Then follow the instruction..

[Slow Networking - one direction]

why dont you try "ethereal" and see if the network data transfer is slow or the read write to the disk is slow.