Curious George: Blinking HDD Light! I noticed the hard drive activity light on my computer was blinking every second - on the second - when I was absentmindedly staring at it and noticed it synched up with the ticking of the clock on the wall. Thus began my strange odd-yssey to make it stop.

And yes I asked over at MeFi but don't get freaked out. We're just friends, it's you I love. I noticed it was blinking every second - on the second - when I noticed it synched up with the ticking of the clock on the wall. Then I wondered what was accessing the hard drive every second. Using the Start -> Run -> msconfig utility, I've started bare-bones and run diagnostic "Disk monitor" and "Process Monitor" (and "TCP View") from the seemingly excellent Sysinternals site. I've gotten it so Registry, File System, and Process & Thread activity is essentially stopped - but the HDD indicator light keeps blinking. Every second. Tick . . tick . . tick . . Nothing looks out of the ordinary TCP wise . . . Spyware, malware, virus, etc. scans show it's clean . . . ??? I thought it was spyware but no processes run, no ports are open, no disk activity - just this @#! blinking light . . . It's a 5-yr old Dell Optiblast or whatever, and afaik the HDD light didn't blink like this before