Jon -

I agree that's the "official" Mickey answer, and the only one they'll give you. The key to what it means is in:

"This issue can occur if ..."

Unfortunately, the cause described isn't the only thing that can cause repeated restarts, and they've been less than forthcoming about the "fact" that FAT32 was a "quick-fix" for some problems that has caused some others. So far as I've been able to tell, there is no complete description of the specific contents of the root folder available anywhere at the Mickey$oft support sites - information you'd need to really tell what's happening.

If you run defrag in Safe Mode, you get a dumb defrag. If you subsequently try to run defrag in normal Windows, it will try to reorganize to improve operating efficiency, and it will take a very long time.

IF you can get a defrag completed in normal Windows, it will usually work more quickly the next time - in normal Windows, and it should improve with each successive run. The first few passes in normal Windows may not show much improvement, but eventually you can get at least to where an overnight defrag works to completion.

EVERY time you run a defrag in "dumb mode" you re-scramble the disk, which is okay if that's the way you want to do it; but you'll never get the benefit that's available from letting Windows do it "it's way." It will always take as long in Safe Mode as it took the first time you did it that way. And every time you run it in Safe Mode, it usually sets you back to the original situation with respect to a normal Windows defrag.

You should turn off anything that might interfere, but you can do that by clicking them up from the SysTray and turning them off individually, or you can use Ctl-Alt-Del to bring up the "running processes" and stop them there. Screen savers and AntiVirus are probably the most common suspects. For a couple of reasons, you should NOT turn off SysTray, although it doesn't really seem to cripple things if you do.

The whole point is that MOST of the restarts are NOT caused by external processes, they're built into the disk file system. If you want things to get better, you've just got to work through them a couple of times - in normal Windows mode with the "optimize file locations" turned on. This may mean running for several hours at a time several times in succession to get the first one or two defrags done, but IT WILL GET BETTER IF YOU (CAN) DO IT.

Defrag will complete (usually) in Safe Mode, but it never gets any better. That's okay too, if your happy with what it does there. Safe Mode may actually be your best option if you have a lot of TSR processes on the machine, but for most Windows users it's not the best choice.

John