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I've found that CrossCrypt is a really good solution--entirely open source--that works on any version of NT.

If you do not have a separate partition, CrossCrypt will also allow you to mount a file as a drive. This comes in really handy for mounting ISO images as well.

The only tricky bit is if you want to set your entire user profile directory (including registry) to the mounted partition, because this means that you would need to have to run the encryption before you login--probably requiring an administrator user. In my opinion, not worth it. Doing this correctly would probably require magic with a GINA, Service, Utility Manager script, or HKEY_USERS\.Default\ControlPanel\Desktop\SCRNSAVE.EXE

But if you just want to encrypt individual folders, it is simple to do manually using this. And also much more manageable since you don't need the folder decrypted all the time while you are logged in--you just decrypt it to load a document, and unmount the partition once you are finished.

I've been doing it for years on my deskie and lappy. I mean, why wouldn't you?
You can travel or leave your Pc on without the worry of script kiddies on a borrowed trojan cavalry:

Here's a freeware package working under Linux and Windows.
I've been using them both for years. Never lost an bit of data:
Command line, but easy anyway:

http://www.scherrer.cc/crypt/

Also PGP has encrypted volumes with a nice GUI, though not sure if it's still free.
They yanked it a few years ago which is why I went to ccrypt.

Have been a few others I've looked at, but the above cover the field nicely.

Neither is Visual Studio 2005. You get a warning and everything when installing it. Nero and TortoiseSVN cause service crashes. Oh, and doing anything slightly unusual (say, using CrossCrypt to mount an image) is completely fucked up because the admin-class users...aren't really administrators. We now have this shiny new UAC "technology", which needs to be explicitly invoked to get privileges that were normal in XP, so any older apps that aren't specifically written for Vista will just fail with "access denied" or a similar error. You'd think that the API would be smart enough to put up the UAC prompt in a situation like that, but nah, they really wanted to screw developers and users as much as possible.

Cross Crypt - Open Source AES and TwoFish Linux compatible on the fly encryption for Windows XP and Windows 2000.

It uses the excellent Filedisk to appear as a volume in Explorer.

It's GPL, sorry to restate that, but I dunno if you read the headline fully or not.

It is CrossCrypt.

However, it hangs for me while writing lots of files on the crypto disk from windows, and the author had not replied to emails about the problem.

Why destroy when you can simply have everything be encrypted? It's cheaper too, in fact there are some free / open source on the fly encryption programs that can do large partitions:

• TrueCrypt
• CrossCrypt

Do any of the Linux distributions do encryption, of even full partition/harddrive encryption? That maybe ideal.

Just an obligatory mention of the Free / Open Source alternative: CrossCrypt, and the graphical version, CrossCryptGUI. Actually, I don't think I could've picked a worse time to mention them. The CrossCrypt site is down, and for some reason, the CrossCryptGUI site now displays a black background (so you can't see the text).

Nevertheless, I've used CrossCryptGUI 0.75 for some months now with a 20GB encrypted volume, and haven't had a problem (though backups are essential in case of corruption). As far as I'm aware, it's the only PGPdisk-like program on the Windows platform that is Free / Open Source and in active development.

Actually, on doing a search it appears another program called TrueCrypt, which I'd tested before CrossCrypt, has been resurrected. It had a more polished interface and documentation, and support for USB flash drives, but development was halted after Securstar (the makers of DriveCrypt) made legal threats.