I've been gone for a week and this may not be useful at all since youve decided to reinstall with linux it looks like from skimming.

I've had problems in the past with errors like this when the hard drive was nearing filled.... but it may be unrelated.
I would advise deleting what you could live without after backing up to floppy/CD if possible... maybe freeing 400-600mb more space, then doing a disk deframent(or commonly called defrag)... and possibly a scandisk(error checking).

It may or may not help.... but had seemed to help with full hard drives in the past for me. Of course i haven't had a space issue with hard drives since getting a 250gb and a DVD-RW burner... four years ago... so it may be alot different in windows XP than windows 2000/9x