Can't log in to my account after system crash

Question

I'm looking for help with a bizarre problem that just started on my mac. I was using the computer (just using Safari, Mail, etc., nothing fancy) and got the message that my disk was full and I should quit some programs to free up space. I check my startup disk and I have over 5 GB free. So I ignored, it came back... This happened a few times and then Mail froze up (spinning beachball of death), I tried to force quit it, but no luck, then the whole machine froze up. The beachball was still spinning and the cursor would move, but nothing else. I tried ssh-ing in from another machine on my LAN to kill programs, but ssh never responded, so I had to force a reboot.
My machine seemed to restart fine and came up to the login window. I type in my username and password, it responds like it has successfully validated my info and is going to log in, then the background changes, changes back, and the login window reappears. I am able to log into another account that I have on the machine (which is how I am posting this). I have examined the console and system logs and found this:
Nov 1 21:14:42 Vrksasana /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow: Login Window Application Started
Nov 1 21:14:43 Vrksasana loginwindow\[523\]: Login Window Started Security Agent
Nov 1 21:14:46 Vrksasana crashdump\[538\]: lsregister crashed
Nov 1 21:14:47 Vrksasana crashdump\[536\]: loginwindow crashed
Nov 1 21:14:48 Vrksasana /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow: Login Window Application Started
Nov 1 21:14:48 Vrksasana loginwindow\[542\]: Login Window Started Security Agent
Nov 1 21:14:49 Vrksasana crashdump\[536\]: crash report written to: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/loginwindow.crash.log
Nov 1 21:14:51 Vrksasana crashdump\[541\]: crashdump crashed
Nov 1 21:14:51 Vrksasana crashdump\[541\]: crash report written to: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/crashdump.crash.log
Nov 1 21:14:59 Vrksasana crashdump\[555\]: loginwindow crashed
I'm concerned that this may be a hard drive problem, but I'm hoping that someone knows what is going on here and can provide a somewhat less drastic solution than reformatting the drive. One thought I had was a (or multiple) corrupted file(s) in ~/Library, but I don't know where to start...
Any help is greatly appreciated! (and in the meantime I'll be attempting to update my backups...)
Thanks!
peter

Answer 1

This problem was not ever actually resolved. I simply updated my backups via firewire target mode and then did an erase & install.