I sympathize, and actually, I'm in the same boat right now.
My 3D graphics suddenly disappeared, meaning no video and no games that use it. Downloading new drivers didn't work, so I trued a system restore, and it's telling me my system restore points are corrupted - that's scary! My anti-virus program (Norton) says no viruses.
I'm way beyond my comfort zone in trying to deal with this, so I'm going to at least talk to Best Buy's Geek Squad and see how much it'll cost for them to check it. I don't want to pay for them to do the routine stuff - I've already done most of that. I have a couple more things to do...
... and I need this computer for job hunting and interview follow-ups and such. Using the local library's computer just doesn't cut it. I could use the last of my dwindling savings to by a cheap laptop, but I really don't want Vista/Windows 7. Half my software won't work with that, and I sure can't afford a few thousand right now to update it.
(Sorry, the need to vent was strong.)