I have been having what appear to be disk problems, yet
none of the diagnostics show any. Twice in the last two
days I could not boot and had to do a "Recovery" using my
original Windows 2000 installation disk. The first time I
did the recovery my system came up and I was able to logon
without any apparent loss of data. After the second
recovery I apparently lost some data in my user profile.
I got an error saying that the system could not read
the "registry" during logon. After a little bit the logon
proceeded, but my desktop no longer looked the same. I
looked in the "Documents and Settings" folder and noticed
that my logon folder "The Pruiett Family" had been
renamed "The Pruiett Family.bck" and another folder had
been created called "The Pruiett Family.PRUIETT." It is
this latter that was apparently being used for my logon
session. I logged into "Administrator" and tried to copy
the files from .bck to .PRUIETT. All copied except
NTUSER. When copying NTUSER I got a "Cyclic Redundancy
Check" error. Incidently, I have run a DOS CHKDSK/F with
no errors reported. I have run a windows disk scan with
no errors. I just finished a thorough up to date Symantec
virus scan with no viruses in memory or disk. Any
suggestions?

Two possibilities I can think of is either (1) a really boned up system, or
(2) a disk drive getting ready to give up the ghost but not showing severe
symptoms except at certain temperatures.

Try running, at a Command Prompt, SFC /SCANNOW and let it correct the errors
it found. Follow that with a reboot, a reapplication of SP4 and another
reboot. (You can never reapply the latest service pack too many times.)

If you have Norton Utilities, run WinDoctor. Rather than take the automatic
fix for Registry errors, you might want to manually examine the suggested
fix and make the decision yourself based on your knowledge of the system.
Then, reboot, re-reapply SP4, etc.

Also if you have Norton Utilities, try running DiskDoctor and do a thorough
scan (or even SpeedDisk). If it is bad sectors, the utilities will attempt
to salvage the data and mark the sector so that it won't be used in the
future. If a lot of bad sectors show up, do a backup of the system as soon
as possible and start shopping for a new drive.