attempt to access beyond end of device

Before anyone asks, no my disk is not full:

pryzbyj@perseus:/usr/src/penguin$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1             3.7G  1.1G  2.5G  31% /
/dev/hda3              19G  349M   18G   2% /home
/dev/hda4              14G  1.5G   12G  12% /usr/src

Sizes shouldn't have changed by more than 01% since I got the error.
Interesting: rerunning updatedb --localuser=nobody 2>/dev/null fails to reproduce the error.

Is the error possibly the result of filesystem corruption? I imagine that each directory has a pointer to the disk location of each of its member files; if that pointer were larger than the disk size, would this error be the result?

If this is the result of filesystem corruption, it is not necessarily a problem with ext3 or some othersuch, as I have done some *hard* shutdowns recently (read: control-alt-backspace on a sis motherboard).

Justin