Random Folder Corruption - Folders Cannot Be Deleted

I am having great difficulty with my current hard drive, a Maxtor 160GB 7200 drive. About a month ago, several folders began randomly turning into gibberish, and when I click on the folder, the amount of data listed is in the Gigabytes, instead of Megabytes. The corrupted folders could not be deleted, nor could the programs be removed. So, three weeks ago, I reinstalled Windows XP and re-formatted the partition on which these corrupted folders were located. For three weeks, things have been just fine. Today, however, when I tried to use Corel Quattro Pro, it would not work. Sure enough, the entire Corel folder has turned into unintelligible goo, and can not be deleted. At first, I thought a virus might be causing this random corruption. However, I now I suspect that this constitutes hard drive corruption, possibly early signs that hard drive failure is around the corner. One bit of information that I think I need to relay is that, in addition to Windows XP, I also run Windows 98 on this computer. None of the 7 partitions are over 20GB, however, so I wouldn't think that Windows 98 would have any trouble recognizing the data.