kk.. soo heres what happened.. my XP seems to have attempted suicide and almost got there.. heres the events prior to the crash:

i was using PerfectDisk 7.0 to defrag my drives and i did a defrag on start up of the System Files and the Page File. so all worked like a charm.. booted up to windows n everything.. in windows i did another defrag.. jus to make sure
so it worked and everythings in la la land..

next i use windows Disk Cleanup Utility to clean up a buncha junk. and i checked the boxes on anything that didnt have a 0kb

so that works.. then i go click on Start. and all progs.. it almost showed up but disappeared so i thot i misclicked.. then i go back into again and eveerrrything i mean everything in the all programs menu is gone cept for accesories and some random folders.. but even in those folders it was EMPTY.. the only thing i found left was perfectdisk in system tools.

so i restart and found my XP unbootable.. it says some hd.dll or somethin h cannot be found in system32.. asked me to put it back n restart.. well i couldnt cuz i cant boot.. lol so i jus reinstalled xp..

i jus wanna know what could have caused this to happen so i can avoid it in the future. thanks!

Sounds like PerfectDisk is the Perfect Disk Destroyer!
Defragging using different programs can create all sorts of havoc.
In the past, a disk defragged with the good old Norton Utilities (Speedisk) worked better than one defragged with Windows own util, which came from PCTools.
Each defragged, but using different algorithms caused different outcome in the end, although both did a reasonable job.

If defragging is important to you (and it should be) then go for the best, and get Diskeeper, now in version 10. http://www.diskeeper.com/defrag.asp
There are older (free) versions around, and they do a very good job as well.

arrghh wutta waste... to think perfectdisk was a good program >_<