not getting free space after delete

[Gubs]

I'm pretty low on hard disk space at the moment so I deleted a couple of things today, but the disk isn't reporting any more free space. I had 360MB free before, deleted just over 500MB, and had 360 still at the end.

I've run chkdsk a few times, with and without /f, with varying results... in read-only mode, it finds errors and tells me to run it with /f, so I do that and it doesn't find any errors. So then I run it read-only again and it gives me a different error message... the ones I've had are -

- Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap.

- CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap.

- Correcting errors in the master file table's (MFT) BITMAP attribute. Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap.

Running it with /f has never found any errors.

The disk is NTFS formatted, and running XP Home. Anyone got any ideas what I can do to fix this?

[Steve]

I hope those deleted files aren't sitting in the recycle bin

Also the recovery console (from booting off the XP CD) sometimes sorts out errors that normal chkdsk can't.

[Gubs]

I hope those deleted files aren't sitting in the recycle bin

Certainly not!

Also the recovery console (from booting off the XP CD) sometimes sorts out errors that normal chkdsk can't.

Running chkdsk from there reports the correct amount of space and doesn't find any errors... booting normally again and I'm back to it not showing again.

[Gubs]

Anders: no, I don't have anything like SystemWorks (and this has never happened before).

Is Windows increasing the swapfile (Virtual Memory) now that it has a bit more hard drive space to use?

The virtual memory settings says it has a swapfile of 767 MB, and that the current free space is 1131MB (which is correct). The difference between these is what's being reported as free space elsewhere, so that looks like a good reason (but doesn't explain the chkdsk errors?). And why would Windows suddenly change the swapfile size? I did double my RAM a few weeks ago (and IIRC swapfile=1.5xRAM is usual?) but I've had a lot more hard disk space than this free since then, so it should have changed before now?