XP Checks Floppy Drive...Why?
 

After I bootup and reach my desktop, xp tries to look in my floppy drive and see what is in there.

I can understand why it would do this during boot to see for a system disk, but why would it do it after I'm loaded?

I've heard that this could be a symptom of a virus, but I have no idea what it could be.

Any suggestions are welcome.

I would assume you have some form of anti-virus installed?

If not, you should.

Explorer stats the floppy drive to see if there's a disk in, and what the label is, so it can display it in folder views.

That's one possible explanation.

win98 does the same thing, like when I open the "My Computer" icon.

simple suggestion: remove the floppy. I've considered removing mine, since it gets used maybe once a month, at most. Just havent gotten around to it yet.

I've removed my floppy and have had very very little need for it. The_Dude, I think you're at college.. meaning you're on their network. I've found that if you have that and a CD-Burner (w/ a CD-RW disk) you're fine. Anything I do in the comp labs at uni I just copy to my computer up at res (dorms). Anything I need to take to someone else (i.e. install programs for someone else's computer, files for class, whatever) I just burn to a CD and it's fine. Very easy.

As for the actual reading of the floppy drive: if you have an anti-virus program installed, it may do periodic (or initial if it only reads after a bootup) checks of the floppy to make sure there's no viruses just sitting on it.

like latch said a/v software will scan it.... at bootup and shutdown it will scan it for viri

That's your antivirus scanning it. I'll bet if you disable floppy checking in you AV prog, it'll stop happening.

Same here. Apart from CD burner, I picked up a USB Flash drive which works like a charm.

I do have a 52x rw drive and a compact flash drive, but nothing comes to the ease of use of a floppy.

Flashcards come close, but the school pc's dont have flash drives.

They do, however, have zip drives, but I dont have one on my pc.

Maybe once i get a zip drive, I will remove the floppy.

XP sux for starters

that helped.

Haha, one can't take it seriously when his sig is messed up HTML on a forum.

run filemon or diskmon from sysinternals.com and it'll show you what accessed the drive, it'll likely be explorer just enumerating the drives, since unfortunately the way to detect floppy drives is to look for them.

Another reason - Any application that you have used that you once saved or read on the floppy drive. If the file is still in the recently opened list, it can cause the Floppy to index on boot. Like someone above mentioned, I disable my floppy drive.