I have a brand new HP a6400f PC with 3GB of memory running Vista Home Premium. I 
have disabled as many services as possible (windows defender, windows firewall, system 
restore, Superfetch, most of the mobility or media center based services etc.) and 
verified the task scheduler hasn't launched anything in the background, but when 
no user programs are running and the computer has been idle for over ten minutes 
I can still hear it briefly move the disk heads every couple of seconds. 

Task manager reports 0% cpu utilization when this occurs. There is no trace of any 
activity in the event monitor once Vista has finished fully booting - my first thought 
had been that there was some sort of logging program running in the background.

This ocurred before I installed a (Comodo) firewall and anti-virus (Avast) program. 
I used Codestuff starter to reduce the number of programs loaded at startup to just 
Intel's ianotif.exe (replaces the ATA drivers to increase performance) and HP's kbdstub.exe 
(keeps track of how many times the system has been recovered - I'd remove it except 
that supposedly prevents the keyboard manager from recognizing its a HP). 

The computer will go into sleep mode on its own, and when that occurs the disk powers 
down.

Unfortunately Sysinternals's FileMon doesn't run under Vista, and I can't isolate 
the process that is writing to a file using Process Explorer (I can see what files 
are open but it has no information about which ones are being written to).

Suggestions? If I could figure out what file is being written to I could probably 
figure out whats causing it. 

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