[JBotAlan]

Please back up everything. Make your restore disc(s) and be ready if your hard drive goes south this afternoon. That way, you'll be ready if it does. The reason I say this is that it is odd that a memory card would bother the boot process at all.

Please try the following only after you've backed it up first:

You might try running a check disk--open the Run window (either by pressing R with the Windows key held, or if you don't have a Windows key, press Start, Run) and type:
chkdsk c: /r
and press OK. A DOS-style window will open; it should state that it cannot lock the drive. Type Y and press enter; this will let the scan run when the system reboots. Restart it; the scanner will do a detailed scan. If you see a bunch of errors, you may have seen a hard drive failure.

JBot