I went into the load screen, it took longer than usual to load and during the load process several error messages appeared saying something along the lines of "file: *whatever* is not valid tes format" and then the save games that were mentioned in the error messages do not show up on the load game screen, please help if you can i fear for my life (or lack thereof) may come to an end if i or someone else cannot sort this out

MANY MANY THANKS

Try going into a new game -- if that works out, save and see if you can load your newly created savegame. If you can, then you can hope to salvage the data in your saves using Morrowind Enchanted Editor (A utility that I'd recommend just for its Suran splashscreen -- it also helped me through the ESM conversion process for Suran Reborn) by selecting all the data and copy-pasting it over to your new save.