My laptop is dying.
Well, it's actually running decently now, after a couple of days of not booting. I finally tracked the problem down to the motherboard...One of my (two) RAM slots is going bad, and the computer refuses to start if I have any RAM in that slot. The good news is that it seems to run fine if I don't have any memory in the first slot, the bad news is that I'm now down to 1GB of RAM. :-( After having 2GB in it before, I'm pretty spoiled (I specifically upgraded when I decided that the previous 1.5GB wasn't enough) and it's noticably slower. Oh well...I'm due for an upgrade next November anyway, so I may just have to bite the bullet and move it up a bit.