Allright long overdue follow up on the backup problem.

Now, when you use Norton Ghost to backup your active partition, what you sometimes ... ok most of the time might get is a PQI error. This is in my opinion because you're in the OS while backing it up ... it's really well documented on a Radified forum. PQI Error

My solution to the problem was to run scandisk from my Xp Installable PE (Preinstalled Environment). That fixed the PQI error, but I still have to really test the integrity of the hwole process by actually completing a restore.