N360 high disk i/o activity

Very often my system becomes unresponsive, and the Task Manager usually shows N360 as responsible. Sometimes I can hear that there is no disk activity, but when I launch a new program the disk i/o starts up for several minutes and degrades the system to such an extent that it's impossible to use the pc while that is happening. And the problem always happens when I wake the pc up from the "sleep" state. I'm sure that this wasn't the case in the past, but over the past 6 months or so it has steadily been getting worse to the degree that it's now extremely frustrating. Help!