BSoD playing certain games, various error codes (usually 0x03b)

Well, THAT'S certainly interesting. SFC is what's screwing with diskmgt.chm. It was the correct size before I ran it, and now immediately after running it it's back to being 80kb. I run it a second time and it restores it to its original size. Repeatedly running it alternates between 80 and 78kb. When it changes it to 80kb is when it reports being unable to repair it. When it changes it back to 78kb it reports it being successfully repaired.

Any updates on this issue?

Not really. Just a few more BSODs in the meantime.

Hopefully Noel's got something up his sleeve for you.

In one of your earlier posts you had stated that you weren't able to post the output of your chkdsk run. You should be able to find the results in the Event Viewer by searching for wininit and/or chkdsk events.

I'd really be interested in that output as you've got some strange file/filesystem issues.

I thought 0x03b STOP errors were generally associated with graphics issues? I mean obviously there's something screwy going on with something related to the filesystem, but I didn't come here to install SP1, I came here to fix my BSODs. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to install SP1 and I appreciate the help, but there's more than 1 problem here it seems. Are we just hoping that fixing whatever is wrong with that will also fix my BSOD problems?

I will try to post my chkdsk results tomorrow if I can find them.

All it takes is one hardware issue to spawn many other seemingly unrelated issues.

Would a funky hard drive also be the possible cause of a system that seems to take way too long to boot? Even like 3 minutes after hitting the desktop when my gadget come up, I can see something is still eating hard drive bandwidth like mad.

Of course it could. Now that you mention that, I'm thinking you might want to avoid another chkdsk run for the time being, unless you already have all of your data backed up somewhere else. Instead I'd start with a quick check of that drive by using something like CrystalDiskInfo: CrystalDiskInfo5_1_0.zip. Post a screenshot...

Here are the results of my earlier chkdsk:

Code:

Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.

A disk check has been scheduled.
Windows will now check the disk.                         

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 5)...
  527616 file records processed.                                          File verification completed.
  882 large file records processed.                                      0 bad file records processed.                                        2 EA records processed.                                              60 reparse records processed.                                       CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 5)...
  647520 index entries processed.                                         Index verification completed.
  0 unindexed files scanned.                                           0 unindexed files recovered.                                       CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 5)...
  527616 file SDs/SIDs processed.                                         Cleaning up 838 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 838 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 838 unused security descriptors.
Security descriptor verification completed.
  59953 data files processed.                                            CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
  37509096 USN bytes processed.                                             Usn Journal verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
  527600 files processed.                                                 File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
  164401750 free clusters processed.                                         Free space verification is complete.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the
master file table (MFT) bitmap.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

 976657407 KB total disk space.
 318215128 KB in 311850 files.
    173444 KB in 59954 indexes.
         0 KB in bad sectors.
    661831 KB in use by the system.
     65536 KB occupied by the log file.
 657607004 KB available on disk.

      4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
 244164351 total allocation units on disk.
 164401751 allocation units available on disk.

Internal Info:
00 0d 08 00 63 ac 05 00 6f 16 0a 00 00 00 00 00  ....c...o.......
09 03 00 00 3c 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ....<...........
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................

Windows has finished checking your disk.
Please wait while your computer restarts.

Nothing seems amiss to me, unless there's something hidden in that hex code at the bottom.