This sometimes can happen if the HDD and OS on it is screwed up.Happened to me once on the mini laptop.Try reinstalling OS.Just be sure to delete all the partitions!Also try to do the same thing with XP and see if it works.If not then your HDD is either going bad or it simply doesn't provide the disk caching.
By the way...having disk write caching enabled on the computer,that gives it extra performance by making disk writes more efficient,but it can sometimes interfere with how certain applications work on the computer.If this is the case then you may need to disable disk write caching on the computer.This MIGHT BE the reason why this option disables on your system automatically.
To enable or disable disk write caching,open the "Computer Management", select the "Device Manager",expand disk drives,right click with your mouse on your drive and select "Properties" then select "Policies" and then select the appropriate option. While disabling disk write caching can add a performance hit,it does increase the reliability of the machine since having a power failure after an application write (but before the disk write cache is flushed) can sometimes result in file corruption or application failure.
Cheers!
