Well, spent most of the day trying to figure out why my PC kept kicking me off (and refusing to boot into Windows), turns out it was due to a Service Pack 3 incompatibility with certain AMD processors. That'll teach me to skip certain updates (apparently, a patch that addresses the problem was released a couple of weeks ago).
Anyway, I had ended up reinstalling my Windows partition before finding out the real cause of the problem, so that's a couple hours of my life I'm not getting back. Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for my little Knoppix Linux install. If living without Windows isn't such a horribly restrictive environment, I would've switched to Linux full-time to avoid these stupid "updates."