Yesterday I was surfing the net minding my own business, when all of the sudden I get a whole bunch of pop-ups. I began closing out of them, but one thing led to another, and somehow, I ended up installing something pretty dangerous I think. I think that because last night at 8 oclock our time, my computer decided to freeze up on my dad (while I was at work). So he restarted it, and now I cannot log into either of the two users on the computer. It simply freezes up before it has a chance to do anything besides display the "Loading personal settings..." dialog. Anyways, I tried to get in via Safe Mode to recover some of my data, but it still wont let me into my user. It will let me into the other user, but since all my files in my user are protected, I cant access or copy them to another computer on our home network. So this has left me in a fine situation. 1) No backups. (doh!) 2) No access to files. 3) Possible reformat on the horizon.

Oh yeah! I also ran three different virus scans from the other user, and all showed up with no results. Nothing new in msconfig that I could find, and when I did a system restore, nothing changed for the better.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what could have caused this monumental catastrophe? Any help would be appreciated. With luck, I will be able to figure out some way into the system, but things arent looking good at the moment.

/me crosses fingers