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And thanks for the heads up that running RAID1 isn't going to prevent this in the future. What I have is certainly a currupted filesystem. Any idea how that happens or are there a million ways?

I've never seen XP do it by itself. I think the most likely culprit is a hardware problem (hence the suggestion to do recovery on a different PC): CPU, motherboard, RAM, cable. Try running memtest86 to see if anything's flaky. The fuckedest NTFS partition I've ever had was when (in £2000's worth of PC) 5p's worth of IDE header hadn't been crimped to the cable properly, and the disk just fell off the bus with half-finished directories all over the partition.

It's also possible, if you have any third-party programs that mess with the disk structure directly (defragmenters etc), that there's a bug in one somewhere. Any normal program, though, accesses the disk via XP's filesystem code, which in my experience is pretty bulletproof against this sort of stuff given reliable hardware.

Edit: And I'm glad to hear you're getting some of the files back at least.

Peter