I noticed that my GNS UI had become sluggish with frequent pauses where nothing was responsive. Also I had been prompted to use fsck on my home partition during bootup frequently. In GNS, after a sudo nautilus and Disk Usage Analyzer it appears that the culprit was the diectories where I had uncompressed the Gnash-0.8.5 tarball. After deleting those directories, responsiveness returned.

Has anyone experienced anything like this.?

Also what is the best utility for scanning directories and analyzing for corrupt files and directores that I can use from within GNS?

I have all the programs that i build in a separate partition, i noticed that the folder started to grow to much so i separated it from /home. Well i don't know about any other tool for analyzing disc errors (or files?) then fsck.

try testdisk,it makes a good job.