some bad news with my hard drive, if you follow the comments.
i'm kicking myself for not backing up when i had the opportunity. in fact, i was actually going to do it right at the very moment i discovered the last blue screen. just a few hours too late. ugh. *bashes head against wall*.
i've had a little time to think about it. there's an off chance that i may be able to recover parts or all of the install partition because i was moving a lot of files around from drive to drive. if i can do that, i can reinstall the machine, and i will.
if i can't, i'm not sure if i'm going to let it sit and hope i can recover the data by bringing it to a store, maybe read a bit instead, or if i'd rather upgrade to 64 bit vista (which is what i have sitting around). see, it's going to take probably close to a week to get it up and running. given that reality, waiting might be a better plan.
pretty depressed about it, though. that's pretty much everything i've done since i moved here - as well as the culmination of eight years worth of scripting - that is possibly just kablooey.