PartitionMagic error

When I bought my computer 6 years ago, I used PartitionMagic 7.0 to partition the 80GB hdd into 4 virtual drives, C through F, with C being the root partition containing Windows and other system stuff. That C partition is 21 GB in size but has gotten lower on free space (just 2.7 GB now) than I'd prefer, so this evening I used PM to resize some partitions.

My plan was to shrink partitions D through F one at a time with the resulting accumulated unused space from each one eventually winding up in C. I started with F, resizing it down by 3 GB, allocating that unused space to E. It worked OK. I rebooted. Then I tried to shrink E by 5 GB, sending it to D. That didn't work. An error message popped up:

Access violation at 0052DCCC in module 'PMagic.exe'. Read of address 00000008.

I tried again, same result and error message. Rebooted and tried again. Same result and message. Thought maybe there was a problem with the shrinking procedure itself, so tried doing things the opposite way by enlarging D by 5 GB from E. Same result and message.

All those operations were done with my A-V program and firewall turned off. Specs for my system are in the signature area below.

I don't understand the strange wording of that error message, and I'm mystified by the fact that PM doesn't seem to function correctly now but it worked fine a few minutes earlier. Any ideas?

 

Today: Suspecting that my PM program had somehow gotten corrupted during last night's operations, I removed the PM program through Control Panel's Add/Remove Programs and then reinstalled PM from the original CD. (My A-V program and firewall were turned off during the reinstallation.)

Then I set about resizing C, enlarging it by 12 GB from unused space in D and E. The preview displayed all the changes to be the way I wanted. When I clicked on the button to activate the change, that same error message popped up again as last night's and I had to abort the whole job.

The strange wording of that error message makes me wonder, would a chkdsk scan be likely to be useful?