After spending several hours trying various free programs to recover my folders and files from my Windows XP NTFS disk that has the isolated I/O error, I finally found Partition Recovery 3.7, by DiskInternals. It works very reliably, but costs $100 USD (for the NTFS version). I'd say that price is well worth it if you really need your disk (or a single partition) recovered. It can save the recovered folders and/or files in a folder on any drive, including destination folders accessed by file sharing across a local network (LAN) on another computer's disk drive, FTP, and other methods. It's very easy to use even without the Wizard that guides you through the recovery process.
It recovers both existing and deleted files, although I could easily choose to ignore the deleted files. I have no idea how it fares as compared with RecoverMyFiles. The free versions of these programs show you information about the recovered files, but don't allow you to save them.
The program has many other features that I didn't need to use. An apparently independent review of this product is available.
Sorry this sounds like an advertisement, but I'm really impressed with how well it worked.