Has this ever happened to you?

[Uranium-235]

I left my system on last night. Something I haven't done in over a year. I also unplugged the cat5 cable from it.

This morning. When I got up, I plugged the cat5 in and logged in. I tried to access the internet, and it immediately didn't work (like TCP/IP wasn't configured, or something critical like that). Suddenly, without warning it hardlocked. I pushed the reset button.

When 2K booted up again, it came up with 'new hardware found'. Somehow, my ethernet card drivers became unloaded. I tried to re-install them, but windows couldent find a proper diver, which is wierd, since the drivers I was using for it CAME with windows. Almost like windows wasn't detecting a proper vendor ID from the card.

I turned it off (no restart, totally off). And OS boot, nic shows up just fine. WTH happened? How could windows just unload my drivers, not detect it properly, and load everythign fine next boot? this is wierd

OS: Windows 2000 (SP4)