Rapidly decreasing hard-drive space after upgrading to snow leopard

So... recently upgraded to SL on my just over 1 year old MBP. No problems at first, but now acting really... odd...
When I first upgraded I had moved a bunch of files over to an external drive to have enough hard drive space. Had 11GB open when I upgraded, up to 23GB after the upgrade. Then, the other night, I suddenly get a "your startup disk is full" message. I was shocked. Checked and sure enough, had something like 270KB open. I had not saved any new files on the hard drive since I upgraded. Right after I got this message my computer spazzed out and I got a "you must restart your computer" message. Did, and afterwords had 7GB of free space on my hard drive. Don't know what happened to my 23 from a few days prior...
Since then, I have gotten the "your startup disk is full" message several times. When I check, I have everything from 3GB to 0KB of free space. Usually a restart solves the problem for a few hours, but then it pops up again. (In fact, as I wrote that, the message popped up on my screen once again... when I started this post I had 500-something KB free. Currently have 257KB free... again... no files saved/downloaded in the past few days...)
I've never had a problem like this before, and this is BEYOND annoying at this point... considering I've lost all the free space I freed up BEFORE I even upgraded, not to mention the extra space I was supposed to get by upgrading in the first place... plus I've had to restart my computer 5-6 times over the past 2 days, which is more than I've had to do it in the year that I've owned it...
anyone else having similar problems? Any ideas as to what might be going on??

So I'm having the same problem. I was converting songs in iTunes and browsing the web in Safari with a few torrents running in the background with Transmission. All the sudden the computer started hanging and I decided to restarted. After the restart, the Apple logo showed on the grey startup screen with a white progress bar (looked like a firmware update). When it completed and booted to the login screen I got a prompt that my startup disk was full and to delete some files. I know this can't be right because I had about 50GB free on my startup disk. Then after restart I noticed that the drive was fluctuating a lot! It first said I had ~250MB free, then jumped to 698 - 769MB!
I'm attempting a Snow Leopard install DVD startup and Disk Utility fix for repair and permissions. I really hope my HDD hasn't decided to randomly crap out. :-/

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