Computer suddenly will not re-boot completely

Hello - I am Trish, and when it comes to this kind of thing, I am a novice.

My computer is a Windows XP Service pack 2 machine
with Intel Pentium 4 - 2.66 GHz
2 Gig Ram

Wednesday morning I woke to find my computer frozen. During the night a Microsoft update had installed itself and left the computer in this state.

I had to shut the computer off to get out of there, and when it re-booted, it got to the splash screen, then re-booted again - to safe mode. I used System restore to go back to Tuesday night and this worked. I then disabled the windows update and changed my options to go to the Microsoft site for updates. The update was not installed.

Now - every time I have to re-boot my computer, I am encountering this same problem - it re-boots twice, the second time to safe mode. If I use System restore to go back to Tuesday night, it works - using the day before or the morning after (but before the windows update) it does not work.

When I looked at the event log - I saw the following errors:

The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.
Type is “Yellow triangle - Warning!”
Source is “ftdisk”
Got this one 4 times at 11:00 pm


The device, \Device\Harddisk3\D, is not ready for access yet.
Got this one 14 times at 11:30 pm

Source is “Disk” - Type is “red circle with white X in it”
Date is July 12 - 2007 -



DCOM got error "This service cannot be started in Safe Mode " attempting to start the service EventSystem with arguments "" in order to run the server:
{1BE1F766-5536-11D1-B726-00C04FB926AF}

This one at 10:10 pm same day
Source is DCOM Type is the same as above


The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load:
ATMhelpr
Fips
intelppm
kl1
klif

This one at 10:08 pm Type is same as above
Source is “Service Control Manager”


Can anyone help me out? I don't know what these errors mean -- or why my machine is not acting so erratically - or if there is any connection to the windows update that I did not install. Worse, I have no idea how to fix it.
Any enlightenment or help you can give me would be most appreciated!

Trish