We're suffering the same XP related hassles at work too... I know this might sound strange but be warned about running XP's defrag on your hard disk... I know sounds strange and it might just be a gateway laptop thing but everyone uses gateway laptops where I work, specifically the 9550's and we've already lost 4 hard disks all users reported they ran defrag and blamo! Now we've had people run defrag and everything goes fine.. just strange that all 4 disks that were returned had been defraged... they were all less than 2 months old as well.