Edit add: This morning the machine had blue-screened, I'm pretty sure it choked on Window Media Player playing a CD while Media Center was unloading (I had made the mistake of launching media center while a CD was playing - wanted to see if some new software for TiVo To Go had fixed th Hauppauge video card problem - it did).
Since the RAID array formatting job was blown away by the crash, I used Intel's storage manager software to do the job right - removed the array, re-constituted it with a larger stripe size, and used Vista's disk manager to initialize the disk with a more intuitive name. It's formatting now. One nice thing about having a separate boot drive is this major task doesn't have me blown out of the water at all, I'm still up and running, just don't have my big data drive available.