Also I would suggest you run a check disk (chkdsk) on your hard disk. Just open a command prompt window and type 'chkdsk C:', it will probably say it can't do the check until the next restart. (this is assuming you are running a varient of Windows, not sure under Linux but under good old Unix it was fsck, possibly is under Linux too....... ok I am an ass - there was a post about the event log and that makes it windows sorry)
I suggest this for 2 reasons - firstly, duff sectors on a disk can cause dome funny issues especially if a sector calls within a pagefile. Secondly crashes as you have described can occasionally cause soft sector errors that check disk will fix.
