Hi folks, thanks for all the comments. No time to talk now, but suffice it to say that this entire project was almost destroyed last Thursday(see here).

The drive spontaneously malfunctioned and became corrupted and unreadable, which was the worst of my fears. After trying a lot of other stuff, I downloaded a trial of DiskInternals NTFS Recovery 1.5 (here) and was able to see most of my files intact, to my relief. However, I can't save or access these files without plunking down $100. Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated....