Ken> FWIW, I've had weird things happen when using my MS-DOS partition when it (the
    Ken> MS-DOS partition) was corrupted.  I don't know how forgiving the MS-DOS fs
    Ken> code is of filesystem errors.

I am a little paranoid about this, so I run chkdsk every once in a
while.  I have no reason to believe that the MSDOS filesystem was corrupt
at the time of the failure.