Windows just died...

So I was watching a movie last night, the computer was unused and just idling with the monitor gone into power-save mode.

Suddenly it lights up with the blue screen of death and before I can get to it, it shuts down. I noticed something about the Abit uGuru on the BSOD, but that was it.

Switched it back on, and it hangs at "verifying dmi pool data".

Went into the BIOS, checked that everything was normal (it was). Reset all to default, just in case. Started disconnecting non-essential drives. Leaving anything other than the Windows boot drive in gave the expected "non system disk" error. Putting the Windows boot drive back in on it's own, and it hangs at verifying DMI pool data again.

Ran the Windows 7 recovery from the install disc, and attempted to fix the mbr via both methods. No effect. Furthermore, when the recovery console scanned for Windows installations to fix, it started complaining about a corrupted directory. Ran chkdsk from the command prompt, which claimed to have fixed all the errors it found.

Rebooted from the hard drive, and now Windows gives BSOD on startup, with "BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO" and code 0x00000074, from what I can gather, Microsoft claims this is indicative of a RAM fault, but I've found plenty more forums indicating that it generally indicates the registry has been hosed.

All other Windows startup repair tools/options are ineffective or say they can't fix it, or can't find anything to fix.

Anything else I can try, or am I looking at a fresh install of Windows 7?

Before you do a clean install check your hard disk using the manufacturer's tools.

chkdsk /r and again and again until one comes back saying it found no errors.

Then I'd defrag it as well just to give it a bit of a shuffle.

You might like to consider changing the battery on the motherboard. If the battery is dying the cmos setting in the bios fail, causing ram to "change" and windows to crash. I bought a new board with a 9 year old battery installed. Make me think they pick through the wee waste and recycle things like batteries.