It went into standby, and never came back. Now when it boots, it does the checkdisk, then just restarts, but before it restarts, it flashes the attached screen for about half a second. Am i screwed?

Uhh. It looks like it to me - losing the registery file is rarely helpful. What OS?

XP.

I thought you were using 98. On XP I would probably not reinstall. In fact, I can give you little help with XP. If it's anything like 2000, when you boot from the XP CD and it sees an XP install already on the drive there may be an option to repair the install. Try that if it exists.

Right, the only thing it gives me is the option to Install and an option to Repair using the Recovery Console. I messed w/ the recovery console which basically gives you a bunch of Admin commands. I really didn't know what to do with them.

I guess my final alternative is to try and reinstall XP over itself, but, is that gonna really F things up?

If you install 2000 over itself, it doesn't save your settings/drivers. I assume XP is the same way.

If it were me, I'd just install Windows 2000 instead of XP.

thanks for the input guys. Any idea on what would have caused this. Seriously, i did NOTHING, walked away, came back , GONE.

My first assumption is flakey memory. However, it could be about a million other things. Another thing is that there is a patch for XP just about once a week. Most of them are security related. Do you happen to be on a school LAN?

Any idea on what would have caused this.

Yeah, Windows XP. I'm serious about moving back to 2000.

I reckon Robricc's on the right track. Win2K doesn't handle bad memory too well. If you have more that one stick in your computer, take one out and see if it helps and then try the other. You may also try putting the BIOS into default settings and resetting the PCI config.
It may just be too far gone.
Install win2K. It's got a few more fixes on the market.