I have not seen this behavior with bitcoind 0.8.2 on another machine that runs Linux. Has anyone else experienced this?
I was not able to replicate with a VMWare machine (40 GB storage). Does the problem only occur with the SSD, or does it happen on other drives as well? Try using "-datadir=D:\bitcointemp" command line option to set the data directory to another drive.
*grins* I hope I am not revealing your prank, but you'll scare the shit out of him when he notices that his wallet is empty when he points to a new (and initially empty) data directory !