Spontaneous random reboots

We have had several occasions on which the computer spontaneously rebooted. In each case, when it tried to boot, it failed with an error message that said: "load needed DLLs for kernel" We can use our windows XP Pro disk to repair the system. It only takes a few hours.

Does anyone have any suggestions on where to start looking for the source of the original crash?

The machine is one year old, running :
Intel I5-750 processor,
4 GB DDR3,
500 GB SATA hard drive
nvidia gtx 260 based graphics card.

 

Should the previous shutdowns be listed in the event viewer? The "Write an event to system log" box is checked.
I have looked in the System Events section, and have not found anything obviously related.

 

We got another shutdown with the stop code:
C00005eb "unknown Hard Error"

 

I have ran into this issue before. It was a virus that was causing my system to not see the dll files needed. The virus apparently compressed my dll files located in the sys32 folder. I had to compress the entire hard, then decompress it, boot into safe mode and get rid of the virus. can be kinda time consuming, especially with the compression/decompression of the hard drive. One sure way to see is to slave the hard drive to another computer and access the dll files located in c:windows/sys32. if any of these files are "blue" then they are compressed and you know you have this same problem

 

Thank you! JonBoyFishhead.

We transferred the drive to a second machine.
We found a bunch of compressed directories in Windows\System, and IE.
We then ran a virus scan. It found some infected files, and we deleted them.

We then changed the directory attributes on all of the compressed files to not "Hidden", not "Read Only", and unchecked "compress this directory".

We then repaired the MBR / Repaired the Windows XP installation.

It has now been running without problem for several hours while we run a few other diagnostics tests. It appears to be stable once more.

Again: Thanks to JonBoyFishhead !