Raw Data,
I am thinking you will be wiping all your partitions and starting over to answer how we are going to get closer.
As for #7, let me shoot that one down right now for you. You always set Min and Max to the same size. I use 384Mb. It does not matter where it is on your Hard Drive since RAM is orders of magnitude faster than any part of your Hard Drive. If you see your Hard Drive light on, get more RAM.
As for #6 if you have a "catastrophic failure" means it is all gone and the Drive Failed. Partitions are no use to you. If you want to protect against "catastrophic failure" use RAID 1. (Mirrored Drives.)
With WinXP #5 is not needed very often. WinXP does very well handling files on a Hard Drive and with enough RAM, you will not see slow downs even if you have a badly fragmented Hard Drive.
As for #4, this is not Win9X with Fat16 or FAT32, we are talking WinNT Kernel with NTFS.
I can go on but you get the point.
I think symptoms of the problem are showing up in the strange Partition Letter Allocation. Where are all the Drive Letters E, F, G, H, I? It looks like you need to blow out all the partitions and start over. But, before you do, check to see what value you have in Last Drive Letter. Do you have Z in there or L?
Take Care,
Richard