ext3 fsck question

[Neal Gieselman]

We are running ext3 1.20 on a 2.2 kernel for about a year now on
a flash disk.  No problems to speak of that we know of yet.
I just discovered that we do not have the fsck.ext3 nor any of
the other efs2progs utilities.  

I applied the libs and other utilites from e2fsprogs by hand.
I ran fsck.ext3 on my secondary partition and it ran fine.  The boot fsck
on / was complaining about something but I could not catch it.
I then went single user and ran fsck.ext3 on / while mounted.
Bad move.  It ran and reported many errors which I chose to repair.
It screwed the partition up to the point where it paniced on boot.
I could still get it into single user but I found that lots of files were
missing which happened to be located in lost+found (inittab, rc.local, etc).

Anyone else have luck with this combination?
Excuse the stupid question, but with ext3, do I really require the
fsck.ext3?