File Vault issues. How can I turn it off?

Question

After reading all about the issues people have been having with File Vault and because the constant encrypting-decrypting is slowing down my computer, I decided to turn File Vault off.
There's just one problem. I can't. Every time I try to turn off File Vault, the computer logs off, starts the operation, then I get the following error message:
"An error occurred during decryption ( An error occurred during copying ), FileVault will be turned on for this home folder and the home folder will still be encrypted."
In seeing explanations in other discussions regarding File Vault, the first thing I noticed was that I may not have had enough space to do the decryption, so I got an external hard drive, copied the contents of each of the folders inside my encrypted hard drive to the external drive (thus decrypting them), then deleted them from the internal hard drive. Then I shut the computer down to allow File Vault to re-claim the disk space. I was ultimately able to bring the free space on my hard drive to about 195 GB, with only about 35 GB in use. I continued to get the error.
Next, I repaired permissions, then verified the disk. I found a volume structure error which could not be repaired by Disk Utility, but I had Disk Warrior, which had no problem repairing it. Unfortunately, I still get the error when trying to turn File Vault off.
At this point, it is pretty safe to assume that the initial Volume Structure error caused the File Vault decryption error, and repairing it will not fix the issue. From continued reading, it would seem the next course of action is to completely back up my home folder, install the OS fresh, then manually import the data. Is there an easy way to do this? I have a lot of installed applications and settings that I don't want to go through the trouble of re-installing and re-setting.
Would it work if I set up a new user account, manually migrated the data copied to the external drive, tested to see if the new user account was working, then deleted the encrypted one?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Would it work if I set up a new user account, manually migrated the data copied to the external drive, tested to see if the new user account was working, then deleted the encrypted one
I think that's worth trying first - you could always fall back on the OS erase and install if it doesn't work out.
I would do a GetInfo on the external drive and check the Ignore Ownership box at the bottom, in order to avoid any permission problems when copying back.