The "1.5" rule is somewhat misleading at times. After all, a person with 128mb of RAM and a swap file of 192mb will have FAR to little assignable memory space. And at the same time, a person such as yourself with 2gb of RAM, doesn't need a 3gb swap file, which gives you 5gb of total memory space, which is rediculous for a home PC because XP only allocates up to 2gb for any program. And it would be very rare for a home user to have enough gigantic programs open to fill all that space! The very
general rule that I follow is to give XP at LEAST 1.5gb to 3gb of total space between RAM and swap. So if you have 256 of RAM, I would create a swap of probably 1 - 2gb. A system with 1gb or RAM I might make a swap of 1gb.
Regardless, it's probably not the swap file causing the issue at hand.
Have you put any data on the drive yet? Or is it pretty much blank? Because there are two things I'm thinking:
1) Indexing service. Takes a lot to index a lot of files on a drive that size. You could turn the indexing service off and see if it helps.
2) System Restore. XP normaly sets a percentage for restore space, somewhere like 8% or 10%. Which would be about 20gb+ on that drive. And XP could spend a lot of time collecting restore data with 20gb to play with! Right-click My Computer and choose Properties. Then System Restore tab. Check the settings for each hard drive and either turn it off, as a test, or set the percentage down to something reasonable like 3gb or so. Better yet, turn OFF restore for the extra drive. As needing to use System Restore on a non-system drive is near null. Most people ever need S.R. on their primary XP partition.
If worse comes to worse, you could run a program which monitors HDD activity and that may lead to some conclusions. Check out the software at
www.sysinternals.com. They have a couple HDD monitoring apps.