a: drive chatter when opening Notepad and Word

I can live with it, but it's irritating.

Whenever I open a Notepad or Word document, my a: drive kicks in. The drive doesn't actually open. It just chatters for a split second. It only happens if there is text in the document. If I open a new (blank) Notepad or Word document, I don't hear it.

I did another test by saving some notepads to a floppy disk and when I open them in A drive, the noise doesn't happen. The noise also does NOT happen if I leave a floppy disk in the tray.

I don't think it's related to my anti virus program because I've disabled it to test it and it still does it.

It's just weird. Anybody have any ideas?

Thanks.

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OS Name Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Version 5.1.2600 Service Pack 1 Build 2600
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Name XXXXXXXX (edited)
System Manufacturer ECS
System Model K7S5A
System Type X86-based PC
Processor x86 Family 6 Model 7 Stepping 1 AuthenticAMD ~1294 Mhz
BIOS Version/Date American Megatrends Inc. 07.00T, 4/2/2001
SMBIOS Version 2.3
Windows Directory C:\WINDOWS
System Directory C:\WINDOWS\System32
Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume1
Locale United States
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "5.1.2600.1106 (xpsp1.020828-1920)"
User Name XXXXXXXX\xxxxx (edited)
Time Zone US Eastern Standard Time
Total Physical Memory 384.00 MB
Available Physical Memory 211.16 MB
Total Virtual Memory 1.28 GB
Available Virtual Memory 989.64 MB
Page File Space 922.97 MB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys

AntiVir anti virus program
Sygate Personal Firewall Pro
Firefox default browser
Office 2000

Try clearing the "Recently opened Documents" list.

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Try clearing the "Recently opened Documents" list.

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Nope. Doesn't fix it.

I am using the Windows Classic Mode in my XP Home, but I don't think that would matter. I hope not anyway. I can't find anything using the "new" XP GUI. lol!

Thanks for trying.

Place a floppy in Drive A, now open notepad with a small .txt file of some kind. While in notepad save to file a location on your hard drive.

I hope that works. It has for me in the past.

Good luck...

:)

Yeah, the OS sort of likes to check the last place that you saved your documents in. I order to prevent that, I always save to disk then move to floppy through explorer. i also never open documents directly from a floppy.

Well fellas, I've tried it all. Still does it. I've messed with prefetch (off and on) cleaned out all my temp files, etc. Cleaned the registry after doing all that and guess what...

For the first time ever RegSupreme asked for a disk in A:drive while it scanned for obsolete/bad entries in my register!!! It's never, ever done that before! LOL! I uninstalled it and reinstalled it and it asked again. I can ignore it or put a floppy in and continue with the scan. I also looked at the registry entries it brought up and couldn't see anything that looked remotely relevant to the a: drive or text documents.

Ok, this is one of those things that my brain goes dead about. Can I try just removing and reinstalling the floppy driver in device manager? If I remove the driver and restart, Windows should find it again, right? Drivers have always been a bug-a-boo for me, for some reason. I thought I might try reinstalling the driver, if I can. What do you think?

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Originally Posted by mommabear

Can I try just removing and reinstalling the floppy driver in device manager? If I remove the driver and restart, Windows should find it again, right? Drivers have always been a bug-a-boo for me, for some reason. I thought I might try reinstalling the driver, if I can. What do you think?

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Yeah that should be ok, the M$ driver is fine. If that doesn't work then unplug the floppy until you need it.

I once had a problem like that and Nortons AV was the cause, reinstalled Nortons and everything was ok.

joshsiao came the closest, but it didn't register to me then.

This website talked about 95 and 98 but one line in it made a light bulb go off in my head. I tried some of the things they talked about anyway, but had no luck finding anything.

Enter the light bulb:

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To avoid getting this random disk access again, avoid launching documents and programs off floppy disks.

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache...2Baccess&hl=en

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Several weeks ago I needed to find an old password. I have a small little proggy that is self-executing and doesn't install. It's on a floppy along with the associated files with my passwords. So when I went to look for that old password, I opened the files with the .exe on the floppy.

I started out with the File Types and deleted the file association to it. That didn't do it. Off to the registry.

I don't know why...perhaps a typo...but the name of the little program didn't come up searching the registry. (It should have. It was named in the entries I did find by searching for the file extension for it.)

The file extension happened to be MSS. I can't tell you how many hundreds of valid entries for Microsoft contain mss!!! But I plodded through them all and came across three.

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT (two matches)
HKEY_CURRENT_USER
and they each had references to A: drive and the name of my program.

I deleted them and now I have a very quiet computer again.

good to hear that you worked it out MB, thanks for the followup too. :D