I turned off the optimizer last night, then ran an external defragger. I also defragged the registry. After reboot, the NIS gadget showed a forever busy NIS starting up--I left it running all night to see if it would finally load. Come this morning, it was still running (see pix). After another reboot, NIS loaded up fine. This following paragraph is not related.
Soon after that, though--and this is the reason for this message--NIS was running in the background (my idle timeout was set to 3 minutes). I stopped it to see what task it was running. I found that even though I turned off the Optimizer last night, Optimizer was still running. See last two pix.
NIS gadget
Optimizer turned off
Yet it still ran.