Have you tried booting from the system disks? Even if your hard drive is on its way out (went through two similar situations last year and lived to talk about it) you may be able to at least retrieve your important stuff. Too, if you can get it up and running this way, you may also be able to...
Don't know if you tried/had success with the above suggestion, but when I've run into that problem, I've simply stuffed/zipped the file. However, once had to go the other way and send an uncompressed file. Go figure.
Have to become a little more mobile later this year and was looking at R.I.M.'s Blackberry. Nice to know that I may have alternate appropriate options now.