Strange behavior since installing plugin...

Hey y'all.  I have a weird thing going on with my performance meter (X3producer, i7 win7) suddenly after installing and trying a plugin.  Now when i do a fresh boot, and start a new project, the meter shows no activity in the eight threads.
Another weird thing is happening - the HD part of meter is showing a bright yellow hard drive icon and 50%, yet i have 150G free on a 450G 'program' drive C:, and 200G free on a 450G 'Audio' drive. 
 
I have cleared out a lot of data that was there and yet the meter has not changed from 50%. 
I also know that the amount of space on the drives has not been a problem prior to that 'something' that went off the tracks.
Or is this normal?  Do you have to load up the project with plugins to get the meters dancing?  I usually see them all simmering on the bottom rungs - 1st thread a little higher than the rest...

If the project is light, your PC is powerful, and the ASIO buffer is high enough, you may not see any activity in the meters just playing back audio tracks with fw or no plugins in the project.
 
The 50% disk space reading isn't that far off of the actual space on your audio drive, 250/450 = 55.5%. It would hard to see such a small difference in the position of the histogram.