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Good god you already have him ready to reformat... there will probably be all kinds of HD file errors from all the thrashing around. Rebooting in safemode and shutting down from it two or three times even is the safest first course then try last known good config... then go out and get or download a HD repair utillity and boot off it from CD and let it do a sector by sector repair checkout your HD's S.M.A.R.T. reporting or just a filesystem rebuild and repair and after all that barring any other hardware failures you should consider going more medeval on it's ass and do a clean install.
Make any sense?
Oh and coaster matt made very good point infact I am going to do a canned air blast on all my machines too I did have the windows open most of this weekend.
disneyfan makes another good point a linux boot CD would be a great way to isolate the problem to hardware or Windoze and get more detailed errors as it loads or fails to load
Another problem that might cause this kind of chaos depending on your motherboard is the 3V BIOS & Clock backup battery crapping out worth checking if you have one and after replacing various componants still have intermitant problems if your machine is over 2 years old you should replace anyhow
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