Kiera....well, I did exactly that prior to installing P5...in fact, I uninstalled it, then ran scandisk, defrag again prior to putting it in the second time. What is interesting..I redid it because of these problems...right after the reinstall, things seemed pretty good, other than a couple of random windows remaing behind, and a couple of white document screens....it is just plain terrible today...back as it was prior to reinstalling. I already had SP1 installed... swap file---I have not touched that, however, it doesn't seem to be using the hard drive for render...other than when I crank up the hair population...these particular mages were set at default--1000 hairs....there are only 2 groups on the long hair image....so it shouldn't be taxing everything so much. Tried to send a bug report and images to Curious, but the messages keep bouncing...their email must be overflowing.

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together.
All things connect......Chief Seattle, 1854