I haven't actually turned on this computer in a few months (mainly been using my laptop lately) and it turned on fine when I fired it up today. However, after I uninstalled some stuff and restarted, ...

Errant external devices have long been known to be causes of kernel panics, inability to startup, and most commonly system-wide freezes, as outlined in our "Startup Fails" and "System-wide Freezes" ...

my computer hanged trying to quit CivIV a few hours ago. I didn't have time to mess with it so I shut it down at the case, hard stop. when I started back up a second ago I had registry modifications ...