Hard drive suddenly decreases space using programs

Yesterday I ran into problems with my hard drive as I was working away on photoshop. It came up with errors saying the scratch disk was full and I saw that my disk space had run to 53KB left and then to 0. I deleted some files closed PS and reopened only to find it decrease once again. I shut down the mac and it started with 80GB, opened PS again and it lost 20GB straight away. This seems to happen when I'm opening programs now and running them... any ideas?
Running Snow Leopard if that makes any difference.

Hello,
How much RAM & free Disk space do you have also, click on the Memory & Disk Usage Tabs.
Open Console in Utilities & see if there are any clues or repeating messages when this happens.
In the Memory tab of Activity Monitor, are there a lot of Pageouts?

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