5 mins from shooting myself!!!

Most laptop hard drive failure is due to impact damage - remember they are fragile.
Make sure you have decent anti-malware protection and keep it up to date.
Clear out the temp files in Internet explorer regularly.

great......

once the hardware gets replaced.....I plan to use (as now).......

Avast AV
Comodo
AVG Antispyware
Spybot
Tune up utilities 2007
and Ad-aware 2007 - just for backup and once a week scanning.....

anything else you think I might need?

Forgive a personal opinion, but I have never been keen on things like tune-up utilities - I would try it first without. Also ad-aware and spybot can conflict with each other. And finally, if you have a router, use the firewall in that and have no firewall in the PC.

hmmmmm

I guess I see your point......

Tune up '07 actually hasnt done anything to protect these serial crashes in the first place......and they've happened AFTER I've installed it. So I guess I'll try the comp without it.

So, I use Spybot or Ad-aware 2007 (free). For real time protection, I'll use AVG Antispyware.....
Avast AV.

Any suggestions on a software to maintain the registry or not really needed?

There are fans of ccleaner on this forum - perhaps one of them will come forward and say why?

yea, I've heard about ccleaner too.....worth it?

version of Firefox

From the DrWatson log, it crashes at FireFox with stack corruption. What version of FireFox are you using? Probably it is software error of firefox.