Something changed by itself

[MCP]

Recently I messed up my task bar and everyone kindly pointed out that reinstalling kde4-config would set everything back just right.  I followed there suggestion and yes everything was reset and performing as it should.

Then I was trying to get an app working in wine and suddenly upon reboot my computer froze so I did a hard re-set.  But when I finally booted up I was greeted by a desktop that changed.  Not real drastically but enough that I had to reset my virtual desktops and their individual backgrounds.  Now I discover that in that spontaneous change all my printers have disappeared.

Can anyone suggest what might have happened?  Has anyone else seen this happen?  What should I do? Should I just reset up all my printers and go on, or is there something else to be aware of?

MCP

[jaydot]

impending hardware fault?  my hard drive went down recently and for weeks prior i had been experiencing 'odd' events in the system.

try booting from a livecd and run memtest.  if that passes muster, look for what else you can test.