Thanks for your guidance various. I went in to the machine when nothing except the OS was running. I started the task manager and then tried to turn off all Windows updates. At this point there was task manager, control panel and the update on/off windows open. It pretty much locked up with 100's of hard memory errors reporting. Eventually it let me close the task manager but the CPU was maxed out and the errors kept coming. This went on for nearly an hour before the errors suddenly went to 0, CPU usage went to 2% and then the on/off window closed. I switched to Admin and ran the disk surface scan. This went through in a few minutes and found no issues. It didn't show the memory errors or high CPU usage so I am still confused. I then did a defrag, took not very long as it has been kept tidy by regular manual running. I still suspect some memory issue is plaguing the system.
I tried, but failed, to understand and find the necessary settings to turn off the indexing. I did "start, search, services" but "Windows Search Service" didn't appear in the vast list.
I will run some memory tests tomorrow and also try gloogoo for more/other Vista index stopping instructions.
I'm getting there.
Rans6....................