"Is there 'something new' out there?"
Maybe, but it's probably just happenstance.
The one terminally irritating thing about Windows is that it's so hard to track down things like a corrupted kernel driver on boot. Bootlog.txt is huge and figuring out what's wrong isn't easy. And to fix things you really need to pull the disk and put it in a working XP environment (Knoppix writes are a bit dodgy).
"Well, well, well. SSC calculations, huh. I built a system out of 2 inches of wire, 3 pennies and a AA battery that does realtime calculations of particle vectors during the Big Bang. A complete simulation of the first 2 years of the life of the universe, accurate to the theoretical limit, takes about 5 seconds".
PS: Yes, I know about Bart's PE as a way of accessing a disk.