Windows background file handling question

[squidgy]

I made a discovery about Windows recently. What I did was create a Rebol Core script which simply takes a chunk out of a binary file and saves it to another file. Tried it on small files of only a few kilobytes at first, and it did exactly what I expected it to do.

Then I tried it on big files of several megabytes. Again, it worked - but in a rather strange way. What happened was that I would run the script, and the Rebol script interpreter executable would start, finish and close down within a matter of seconds, as though it had already done it. However, the actual output file it created wouldn't appear in Windows Explorer until several minutes later. It wouldn't appear straight away. And meanwhile, the hard disk is churning away. It got there in the end, though.

I have a process monitor program called "WinTop" which tells you how much CPU time is being gobbled up by each application, however, whilst this was happening, the time remained mostly idle, something like 97% idle. But the hard disk was churning away like mad.

So here's my theory. I reckon that the Rebol Core interpreter uses some sort of Windows programming interface function to do it. As far as Rebol Core is concerned, as soon as it has passed this instruction to Windows, it's done its bit and can carry on with the next instruction, or shut down.

I figure that if Rebol Core script interpreter does this, then it's not unreasonable to think that lots of other programs might do it too - they might leave file handling processes running in the background which Windows does when the program that initiated them has already shut down. You're particularly likely to find this happening if you do lots of processing of raw audio and video data.

The significance of this - http://www.the-scream.co.uk/forums/s...?threadid=5710 - if you try to move or copy two files simultaneously, it will take substantially longer than doing it one after the other.

Now I don't think you can rely on Windows to be clever enough to queue these things. However, what I would like is a freeware program which monitors the disk activity, and says what file is being written to and read from. At least that way, I can guess how long it's likely to take for Windows to sort itself out so that I can start doing other things with it. If it's possible to pause one file handling process so that another one running at the same time finishes first, that would be even better. Without a program like that, there's no way of knowing what's holding Windows up.

If something like this exists, then anyone who ever finds that Windows gets progressively slower until they restart the computer is likely to find that this is the solution to that problem.

Anyone able to suggest any? Or is this technically impossible? Thanks.

[jonzo]

U lost me half way but wud this program help ?
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/fr.../procexp.shtml If not the site has loads of stuff some of which may help u more.