^ That's what I ended up doing and the chain loaded fine.  Disk space or MSE was not the problem.  Interesting the problem seems to have happened around the time of the transaction malleability issue blowing up. 

yes it's 0.8.6

Qt version is 4.8.3.

? I thought it was more like 16gb.  https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size

I have a qt wallet saying it has 8 active connections to the network but it has been 42 weeks behind for several weeks now.  The arrow wheel on the lower right does not turn like it used to if that means anything.  I have Microsoft Security Essentials and have added bitcoin-qt.exe to the excluded files as well as the bitcoin folder to excluded locations, but the blockchain was loading fine a few weeks ago without changing settings in mse.  I have reinstalled the wallet as well.  No luck.  bitcoin-qt.exe is hardly using any cpu as it used to.  using windows xp.  My hard drive is getting full but it says I have 5.76 gb free space.  16gb of of the blockchain is already on the drive.