Prodos 2.0.1 / Basic 1.5 name length checking

[guillaum@pogo.trl.OZ.AU (Andrew Guillaume)]

G'day !

I had a problem I had never come across until yesterday. I have a //c with a
Chinook 40Meg HD attached, and I am using Prodos 2.0.1 and Basic 1.5 which
I picked off a friend's diskette. I was creating a Basic file, and when
I decided to save it to disk, I unintentionnally gave it a name which was
19 characters long (myprogramv1.startup). I know that file names are limited
to 15 characters (right ?), so when the Syntax Error message came up, I
shortened the name. But what surprised me was that then Basic (or is it
Prodos ?) complained about an IO error ! When I then tried to catalog the disk
(through various programs such as CatDoctor, Shrinkit, Copy2+, and through
the Basic catalog command), there was an extra file which contained loads of
control characters, was definitely more than 15 characters, and had bits and
pieces of the directory structure in its name ! I can only assume that the
first attempt to save the long name must have written bytes beyond the 15
bytes reserved for the name, thus causing havoc. So my question is, shouldn't
Basic/Prodos check the name length before even trying to write to disk ?

As a corollary to that, needless to say that both the aborted basic file and
the extra one were not to be deleted through "normal" means (such as using
Basic's delete, CatDoctor, Shrinkit, or Copy2+), and I spent hours (it had
never happened to me before) figuring out how to get rid of these files. I
ended up using MrFixit (Prosel8) to fix errors, so that no errors would be
reported, but then having files and a subdirectory (in which the files were 
placed) being immortal. They didn't want to disappear ! Luckily it was the
last entry in the directory, so I used Block Warden (Prosel8 again) to 
physically write 00's all over the subdirectory entry. I don't know what
further damage I may have caused, but the files and subdirectory disappeared, 
and any remaining errors were fixed again with MrFixit. Now I would like to
know what the experts out there (yes, you ! :-) would do in such a situation?

Incidentally, my HD came with Prodos 1.9 and Basic 1.4, and I just copied
the new Prodos and Basic over the old ones. Should I have done differently,
like reformat ? I would also like to know if any of the tools I have
mentioned (CatDoctor, Shrinkit, Copy2+ or even the Apple System Utilities)
will correctly format my hard disk if I required this to be done.

Thanks for any info you can give me, and I hope this is a good diversion
to the "Storm" and "Comments" posts :-) :-) :-)

Andrew Guillaume
a.guillaume@trl.oz.au