I'm running Win XP SP2 and last night started experiencing some serious issues.
At midnight my AVG (free version) started running its daily scan and I went to sleep. In the morning, I went to my pc to power it down and noticed an error which I should have written down exactly but it resembles this: "Cannot create file D:\$n"
Explorer was visible and everything _looked_ fine, but I was unable to activate "My Computer" and I also could not reboot from Explorer... both functions simply timed out.
I forced a power off by holding down the power button. When I tried to reboot, I got past the BIOS but after that windows never loaded. I observed that all the hard drive lights were on, and the green monitor light was on, but nothing more. I did not hear any unusual sounds from the hard drives.
If anyone has any ideas how to troubleshoot this I'd much appreciate it!