There is constant hard drive activity (the hard drive access light comes on very briefly every few seconds). I have seen posts that attribute this to buffer flushing, but it happens even if I'm not doing anything so I don't know what buffers would have changed.

2000 Jul 15 -I fixed this some time ago; IIRC the solution I stumbled onto is to deselect the "Automatically mount CD when inserted" option in the Peripherals/CD Properties dialog in the Gnome Control Center...