Oh, one thought... Can you make a permanent swap file, not one managed by win but a definite block of clusters? All the other win OS's allow this, I would presume that XP can too. Then use Norton to defrag because Norton will put the swap file in a contiguous block. This way your swap file is not spread all over your hard drive and likely not going to be fragmented. The realy problem comes in when the OS has to deal with a swap file in different locations of the drive that may not be in synch with the drive's interleave and may end up fragmented. By putting the swap in a contiguous block, you avoid all that.