Types quick before there's another crash

This PC, which I mentioned the other day needs a clean out, really
needs it now. Some applications have totally lost the plot, I'll have
to re-format the drive. Another worrying thing I've noticed is that
something has been eating or de-allocating drive space at the rate of
many MB per hour and slowing folder and www page opening to an
absolute crawl. Incredibly and frustratingly slow for a 2.4GHz PC.
Task Manager shows nothing using significant CPU time. A couple
of weeks ago I had 10GB free, and this morning, in the time it took
to copy files to an external drive, reported capacity went from 390MB
(down from 1GB before I went to bed) to 325MB. I've looked before
over the past few days but can't find any huge file. But free space
has got so low now that I have to do something about it

I've re-installed XP Pro over what was there and that's seemingly
stopped the rot, but it's a Band-Aid and the machine randomly turns
off, usually at the most inconvenient time. Already I've tried to look
this problem up on the web but it's possibly IE causing the problem,
so I have to ask yous guys as OE seems stable. Also I've not put
many drivers back in, so that could be another cause

I want to start with a clean drive. Previously I've always had 2 drives
and can format one with the other. Two drives not possible at the
moment. What I have got is this C: drive mapped to a Win98 machine
and the XP Pro installation CD

Now, if I could format with the 98 machine, that's going to be FAT32
isn't it ? And NTFS preferred for XP ? The Win98 PC can see this drive
on the LAN, but there's no option I've found to format it, even if I wanted
to. I'm guessing XP just won't format the drive it's on, I've tried. Looked
over the XP CD but haven't yet found how to get it to re-format the drive
before installation. The only options I'm given are install or not

HELP !!!
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