4150 keeps looking for a disk in floppy drive or scanning drive A:

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HP Omnibook 4150 using Windows 2000 Pro, with the original HP removable Floppy drive.
Bios: Phoenix 4.0 rel 6.0
The PC came with Win98 preinstalled. Ever since I upgraded wo Win2k Pro, the PC keeps trying to access the floppy drive every few minutes even though I have NO processes using the A: or B: disk. I have tried disabling the antivirus sw with no effect.
If there is a floppy in the drive causes a significant response time delay.
When there is no disk inserted, get annoying messagebox asking "Please insert a disk in drive A:"
How can this be prevented? waht is the cause?