high disk usage

No, I'm using Microsoft Security Essentials and Win XP SP3 32-bit. I tried temporarily disabling MSE, but no luck there. And, yes, I know WinXP is an outdated OS, but this system really isn't upgradeable (long story). However, it's been completely stable in every other way for years. Additionally, I haven't installed any new software or drivers for quite awhile (several months at least) -- with the exception of updating slsk and fb2k to their latest versions that is.

One thing, I tried was un-sharing all my files and then re-sharing. The un-sharing caused the heavy disk usage to go away and playback in fb2k went back to normal. But as soon as I start re-sharing files the disk usage ramps up. I tried adding small folders (<1GB) at first and the high disk usage eventually stops -- it lasts long after slsk is done scanning the files for sharing, but it does end after a couple of minutes. However, a larger folder (~6GB) that took a couple minutes to scan caused high disk usage for nearly 20 minutes afterward. Though it did eventually stop, so that's something. The problem I have now is that my main shares are upwards of 300 gigs. I added them about an hour ago and slsk is still showing high disk usage. This will go on presumably all day long. Finally, one more thing is that the high disk usage (i.e. 20 MB) doesn't start until the instant the scanning of new shares is complete. While it's scanning it's only 3-5 MB.

Hmmm, I don't think what it's doing is scanning files at this point. I started slsk at 9:00am today and it's now 6:30pm and it's still eating up 20 MB of disk usage. It couldn't possibly take this long could it? Plus how come it started doing this yesterday when no changes had been made to slsk? I've had the same folder shared for years and only add a few albums a day to it at most and nothing like this has happened before.

EDIT: Basically the bottom line is that slsk now sucks up 20 MB/s of disk usage (i.e. read bytes delta) even when idling. I mean, nobody's even downloading from me right now.

I don't want to jinx it, but I think I got rid of the problem. One of the first things I tried doing was rebooting my router -- just to clean the slate so to speak. However, I forgot that this computer uses a powerline network adapter to connect to the router. So after trying dozens of other things and combinations, I rebooted my computer, the router and powerline network. Thus far everything is working normally -- i.e. no constant heavy disk usage -- and has been for 3-4 hours now.

I have no idea what was going on with my network that was causing Soulseek to react in this way, but at least now we know it wasn't Soulseek that was at fault.