I don't run the bitcoin core program regularly, I normally just run it once a month or so to synchronize the latest transactions.

Anyway, I ran it a couple weeks ago for the first time recently, it started downloading transactions but after some time it failed with an error indicating a corrupted database of some sort. I don't have the exact error message saved, unfortunately.

I figured I could simply remove the existing database and re-download all the transactions to fix this, so I attempted doing that. I deleted my bitcoin directory, downloaded bitcoin-qt 0.10.2, installed and ran. It started downloading transactions, and this process took over 24 hours (as expected) to rebuild the database.  However, it never finished- it hung up on some error message before completing, and never worked. After 0.11 was released a few days ago, I tried the same with that, and a similar result occurred- after over 24 hours of downloading and confirming transactions, it threw an error and stopped working.

Is this indicative of a hardware problem on my computer? It really never crashes, it's been perfectly stable generally, and other programs work fine. I ran some memory tests and disk scans just to be sure, and I tried switching the bitcoin data directory to an alternate drive and nothing has improved.

Is there some part of 'bitcoin core' that is saved somewhere other than the install folder and the bitcoin folder (the one under my profile)? I have been deleting these to try to do a clean install, but maybe there is some other folder I need to be deleting also?