I'm running Windows ME (I KNOW.......get rid of it!!!) and my system simply will not run the defrag portion of the Maintenance Wizard. This is particularly frustrating because my 'nearly 21 and knows-it-all idiot of a stepson' is constantly visiting website from which he downloads this noise he insists is 'music' and it takes up a lot of space until I dump the crap.........I have no doubt the drive is in serious need of a good defrag. Any suggestions? (I've already removed the speakers which has eliminated PART of the problem -- if he can't hear it he don't play it!)

(Moderator edit:moved to thread to more appropriate forum.jgweed)

You might try posting your issue in the ME forum here at Bleeping Computer. It is found HERE.

A Moderator will probably move your post to the correct forum soon.

In the meantime here is my recommendation:

Clean, Scan and Defrag in Safe Mode under Windows ME

• Run CLEANMGR
  Click 'Start' then 'Run' and type cleanmgr and click OK.
  A grey box appears that says 'Select the drive you want to clean up.'
  In the pulldown menu select your harddrive, e.g. 'HP_PAVILION (C:)'.
  Then click on OK to run the disk cleanup.
  
  You can also access cleanmgr by clicking Start>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Cleanup.
  
• Reboot in Safe Mode
  Usually achieved by tapping the F8 key as the system is booting, then selecting 'Safe Mode' from the menu.
  If you are not sure how to boot in Safe Mode there is a tutorial here: Safe Mode
  
• Run Scandisk
  Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools>ScanDisk
  Click to highlight the drive you want scanned,if it is not already highlighted.
  Under "Type of test" select 'Thorough' and tick "Automatically fix errors".
  Click 'Start'.
  
• Run Defrag
  Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Defragmenter
  Select which drive you want to defragment in the pulldown menu.
  Click OK to start.

hth

Rimmer's advice is quite sound. The only thing I would add would be to be sure you have cleaned out all the gunk files, etc., first.
Regards,
John

My sister has ME with the same problem. A friend told us it is because to much clutter is running in the background. Since neither of us know much about computers I use ctrl, alt, delete, to get the task manager up, then start ending tasks from the bottom of the list up, until defrag works. Still trying to figure out what we can get rid of permanently, but we can at least defrag once in awhile this way.

Your friend, Maw, has a good point. Using Safe Mode runs the computer with the bare minimum of tasks going on, and drastically reduces the interruptions that send defrag back to the beginning over and over.

If you use Spybot, it has a very good tool to manage which applications launch on start up. You can make a list of these and research each of them on the BC startup database; the database will indicate whether these are needed, optional, or not, and you can use Spybot's tool to prevent them from launching. Doing this saves resources and speeds up your computer.

Regards,
John