I looked into this, and the actual problem is windows returning a "access denied" error code when trying to recreate the journal file immediately after deleting it. I can't find any documentation that says create might fail for this reason, but filemon (from systeminternals.com) says the status is "delete pending" in this situation. So I think this is a genuine windows glitch, which might be related to my having a fast, dual-core processor.
In any case, it seems to be possible to paper over the problem by waiting a few milliseconds and retrying the create.
