format c:
Today was one of those days again where everything is going well (see post below for that) until you get the idea that you could reboot your computer again, since it's been running for days in a row.

BAD IDEA!!

After rebooting, I was confronted with what looked like a freshly installed WinXP. Overcoming my first shock ("OMG! 'tis all gone!") I tried setting everything into place again ... to no avail, as I was shown after the next reboot!
Yes, the GUI was back to good old-fashioned win9x-looks and feels. But that's where the good news were at an end already. My personal files and folders seemed to have been scattered all over my HDD, my internet connection refused to work even after a complete purge'n're-install, my Desktop had an assembling of different icons whenever I rebooted again ... I was that close to the good old problem-solving 'format c:' when I remembered my nifty system-tweaking tool (TuneUp Utilities 2004), so I started it up, tried this and that ...
... again to no avail: my personal files/folders were still scattered over the place, the icons on my Desktop were still playing hide'n'seek after each reboot. This called for drastic measures! But before letting my ace 'format c:' slip out of my sleeve, I tried re-setting the system to the settings from a week ago, which was the last time I had made a recovery point.

And hallelujah! It works again!
Now back to re-installing all the programs I had set to work since then.

Piece of advice: Don't attempt a SP2 installation for XP.
It fucks up your machine royally. This has been the third time I had to use recovery points after trying a SP2-installation...

P.S: Oh yeh, and when starting my desktop PC (because I thought it might take a while with the recovering) I was victim of a HDD crash. ~30 gig of mp3 lost, not to mention all the other stuff I had on there.
Murphy's been out for me today.