I was assuming no malware on the PC, but that is probably a bad assumption in the normal case (this is a clean install, so it may hold here). But such a virus (or piece of spyware) is not likely to spread very fast because it kills its host (hence the fact that it is uncommon, as you say).
There are two ways that error can happen: one is that the boot.ini file is corrupt, as you mentioned, or the filesystem itself is corrupt. I didn't think the boot.ini file was ever touched by anything, but I guess there's no accounting for the taste of virus writers. |
