Today my XP went off the tracks. I think it booted normally but when I
used Agent and Eudora to get hearders and check mail at the same time,
something got messed up bigtime. Agent seemed to freeze, but did work
after a while. Tried a reboot, things got stalled when my bat was
saving email. I finally pushed the Start Button to turn off. On reboot
things were REALLY messed up and Avast anti-virus refused to work. My
last Macrium backup was August 28, but it would have to do. And it
did, though I worked thru it painfully slow as I haden't done it in a
long time. Imaged the backup back on in 20 minutes. Took a long bootup
but everything looked normal. Messed a while with my saved email
rescuing stuff. I do have a bat but I don't trust it. Core Temp
reported 6% usage on both cores all the time???. Anyway, I thought I
better do a fresh Macrium backup. Got it started and saw the estimated
end time was 5 hours! HD Tune then said my 500G drive was running xfer
speedof 3 megabytes/sec! The 1 gig drive was its usual 170MB/sec.
Rebooted and all was ok.

Finally my question is why was the 500g boot drive running so slow on
its first boot after the recovery? Is that typical?