Thanks Mart for stepping in.  I was rather busy elsewhere for most of
yesterday afternoon and evening so didn't have a chance to check for any
follow-up from Richard.

Richard,

As Mart has said a slow application doesn't necessarily mean that the disk
is bad.  Sadly Win Me doesn't have an Event Log such as is in XP where you
could check if the system was having problems accessing the hard disk.  I
can't recall whether you have run chkdsk or not or whether this reports
that you have any bad blocks or not.  Even so with modern hard disks with
SMART, mapping out of bad disk blocks tends to be done on the fly by the
disk itself and the operating system and chkdsk will normally only come in
to play when all of the spare hardware blocks have been consumed.

Since we are talking Win Me you are using FAT32 as the filing system on
the hard drive.  FAT32 is far more susceptible to slow down if fragmented
than say NTFS filing system which is used by most systems running XP.
Have you therefore recently defragged the drive?

Mart:
Is the PC running slow with ALL programs?

Hard to tell, as the only one I can compare to previous is  my MSAccess Db.
Mozilla, SpeechRecognition, etc all seem to be a bit slower than before, but
not as impressively slower than Access. Also seems somewhat slow  to boot,
but again, not impressively so.

How about scandisk (or 'Error checking' if you are running XP)

I've only run defrag, but with no improvement. I'll try 'error checking'.

What happens if you just open Access alone (no data)

Don't know quite what you mean. The Db window opens OK, but anything I truy
to do within an access Db  runs slowly.

Why not try Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del)

Too damned many things to try omitting, and I'm not familiar enough with most
of them to know which are important.  Also, I should have noted that the
modules of Access take forever to load INITIALLY.  If I close the module
window and then re-open ir, it re-opens much faster. Thus, I'd have to close
Access each time I change settings on task mgr.

Install'? - I assume you mean 'open' the same .mdb file on another PC running
Access 2003

Yes

Have you tried running the Northwind Sample Database? - Is that slow too?

Yes. Not noticeably, but the module section is very small, and there is
little data in the Db to evaluate query run-time, etc.

You haven't yet really made a case for suspecting the HDD. You have only
mentioned that it is a particular Access 2003 .mdb file which is slow - and
other (unspecified) small problems. Is the PC running slow with ALL
programs?  Is it slow to boot?  How about scandisk (or 'Error checking' if
you are running XP)?  Does that tell you anything?

What happens if you just open Access alone (no data) - is that slow too?

Why not try Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) and see if you can identify any
'extra' overheads when opening or rather executing queries in Access.

'Install'? - I assume you mean 'open' the same .mdb file on another PC
running Access 2003

Have you tried running the Northwind Sample Database? - Is that slow too?

I think you'll find that a Low Level Format is effectively 'a full disk
clean'. It's not exactly 'selective' - it'll wipe the lot, requiring a full
install etc.