OK few things you can do:
Do you have a virus scan, firewall, ad-stopper, or any other "3rd Party" program running in the background? You might and not even be aware of it. The more stuff you have on your hard drive the harder it is for Windows to do maintenance. Restarting your computer in Safe Mode will usually take care of that in a jiffy. Restart your computer and hold down the Ctrl key on your keyboard, or hold down F8... both will work. Windows will then give you several Restart choices - make sure you select Safe Mode and hit the Enter key. Your computer will then restart with just the bare bones of Windows running. The only thing you should see on your taskbar is the system clock. If you have an external modem, disconnect it. Now you can go to Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and click on Disk Defragmenter. This will work for you.
Another thing you can do is go to
www.bootdisk.com and download the Windows ME defrag. Just unzip it and copy the NEWDEFRAG.exe to the C:\Windows directory. Then rename the file DEFRAG.EXE Once you do that, right click on the file choose Send To and then choose Desktop(create shortcut) that way you will have a good shortcut you can copy and paste the shortcut into your Start>Accessories>System Tools folder so that you have a shortcut there. Be sure to check the shortcut there first. Once you put the defrag file where it belongs, the shortcut that was originally there should work on first click.
Let me know if this works.
