Explorer.exe & Dr Watson Error App Crash Too Often

I have a Compaq-based computer running WinXP SP2 on it and for a little while I've had explorer.exe crash on me from time to time just out of the blue. Well a new problem has risen and it started today and its a nasty one. I was testing out a file-sharing program, but it said I needed the latest Java update to run it, so I went to the Sun Java website and downloaded their J2SE Runtime Environment 5.0 Update 06 (that's what was on the site) and got that all set up and started checking out the program I had downloaded earlier (Limewire Basic) from Filehippo.com and as soon as I clicked on a file from the list of files that came up in my search, the program would instantly close out without notification. I didnt see it as a big deal. I got a hold of the file I was downloading, but every time I went to or near the folder in my personal folder's directory, explorer.exe decided to crash on me. So I thought I might have caught a virus, so I looked to see if it was on some programs I've used in the past for finding trojans and whatnot and it came up clean. So I uninstalled and deleted LimeWire and thought maybe the Java had something to do with it. Turns out I was wrong again. So right now this machine has no Java on it. So I went into safe mode and still could not get to the folder with the file in it. Explorer.exe AND the Dr Watson Postmortem Debugger app both crashed on me (got that normal error in which you can send out an error report to Microsoft) and it did this several times.

So then I booted the computer back into the normal mode and attempted to get to the file through the cmd.exe (DOS) program and I eventually figured out (with the help of someone on my buddylist) how to get to the specific directory that the folder was in and I tried to delete it, but everytime I typed "Y" to the prompt, cmd.exe would crash as well. Now it sais that there are 0 files in the folder (has 3 subfolders in it) that I was trying to delete and 5 folders (including the "." & ".." on the DOS prompt. So I've been screwing around with this for about 4 1/2 hours now and I've had no luck getting to that specific folder. If I try to get to it through my folder, explorer.exe crashes. I can get right to the directory that the folder is in and then it will just crash. Everything else seems to run just fine. I havent tried checking the disk check thing, but what does one reccomend I do? I've already reformatted this computer once before (last year) and I dont want to have to do it again (because I dont have the money or the WinXP disk to get it reformatted again).