Just some random thoughts:
Your hard-drive problems could be the cause. What I'm thinking is that during rendering iClone most likely relies on temp space.
By default the iClone temp directory is on the system drive [C:]. If that is the situation in your case, you could consider moving the temp directory to another drive. That is, if you have another drive in your system. The temp directory can be set in the Preference settings.
I find this more likely then a corrupt DLL, because in that case other programs would suffer the same problem and iClone would probably not just crash while rendering.
Another thing to try is to do a system restore from before your problems started although that doesn't seem a likely solution to me.
Given the state of your hard drive, I would also recommend to do some disk diagnostics. Hard drive failures can be sudden and are not fun. If you have an external drive it would be good to make a backup or even better a disk image, which allows you to restore in case of a disaster (for example, http://www.disk-image.com/download.htm).