>Does anyone have any idea as to how to explain this? Does anyone know how to put a stop to this? I plan to leave the machine sitting inactive again for a longer while and see if the .DBFs later get defragmented too.

Perhaps MS now has a side deal with disk manufactures and this is intended to burn your HDs out that much faster.

Actually, I turned this "stuff" off back in Win98 ... "Scheduled Tasks" it was called, and included Scan-Disk, Defrag, PC-Health, etc.

I did not like the idea of MS "playing" with my systems when I was not around either.

MS does NOT know best.