I Need a Computer Genius, and Fast

UPDATE Saturday 9:30 a.m. PDT:  Due to popular demand, I'm not taking this diary down.  The geeks are having too much fun with it.

Steps taken so far:  When I got home last night I opened the case on the tower and gently jiggled and blew out dust as was suggested by a few of you.  There was a lot less cat hair in there than you'd predicted, although the floppy disk slot in the front of the tower did manage to cough up a sizeable furball.  Didn't fix the problem.

exmearden, who is a mensch, came over at 11:00 last night and spent about two hours futzing with it, but no joy.  The hard drive is, well, toast.

This morning I'm taking the tower to a computer repair shop that exme recommended, to see if I can recover the stuff on the hard drive and either repair the hard drive (which I doubt) or put in a new one.  I'll probably also ask them to reinstall XP and all that while they're at it.

If anyone's interested, the propellerhead information at the bottom of the Blue Screen of Death error message was this:

*** STOP: 0x00000024 (0x00190203, 0x82F8B580, 0x0000102, 0x00000000)