The good news: It looked like the hard drive was corrupted, but it isn’t. The desktop isn’t dead (though it is a piece of crap).
The bad news: It could either be a hardware problem (conflicting printer driver, though I’ve had that printer and driver installed for two years now), or a trojan shutting down the system externally. I’ve unplugged it from the router, so if it doesn’t shut down, it’s a trojan. I have spybot running now. I’ll be running malware scanners all day on it, I suppose.
Sigh.
