Thanks for your helpful suggestions. Fireryone, that was some amazing stuff you put out there. I would never have figured out on my own how to do what you outlined.
I downloaded a copy of Hiren's Boot CD at the suggestion of someone else. It apparently contains a whole host of really neat workarounds. Unfortuntely, the download was compressed in something with a .uha file extension and I couldn't find a program to uncompress the applications.
At the end of the day, I tried to start the computer in safe mode and when i did, everything seemed back to normal, so I took a chance and rebooted