Mercutio Vanse

I have a 160GB SATA HDD attached in my pc, and for months now everytime I booted up it would go to a blue screen and scan the drive, always finding no problems and letting me into windows. However recently everytime it scans the drive it now hangs up in the process, either if I skip the scan or let it go. It still finds no problems in the drive, but will just freeze after it finishes or when I skip the scan. I have unplugged the drive now and can log into windows, what should I do to fix the boot process freezing while scanning the hard drive? Should I defrag the drive, or clean it up? How should I operate on the drive when I cant boot into windows with it on? Thanks for any help

I appreciate your help a lot, thanks so much. Your suggested size however only makes it larger and more blurred, so I set it to 18 which makes it now look normal. At size 28 are they supposed to look more clear, because apparantly mine just get pixelated? I'm running xp SP1

I recently installed the latest beta build of XPize but it caused my icons in the taskbar to become skewed like this -> I have looked through all the settings in XPize and could not fix it, only desktop icon size. To make things worse I un-installed and the icons are still messed up. Un-installing does not get rid of the system changes, even with all options on the unistaller checked. I've switched to XPize 4.1 and the problem persists, can someone please tell me how to fix it, or at least how to fix the icons in the registry, or do a registry restore to properly manage this problem? I had windowsblinds running before xpize and during its install.