Help! Vostro 1400 stuck in a BSOD situation ....

My wife's Vostro 1400 (delivered with factory installed XP Pro "downgrade"
option) has performed without a glitch since purchase August 08. Today,
however, it starts up with a type of BSOD which states:

"A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to
your computer.

"If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your
computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:

"Disable or uninstall any anti-virus, disk defragmentation or backup utilities.
Check your hard drive configuration, and check for any updated drivers. Run
CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer.

"Technical information:

"*** STOP: 0x00000024 (0x00190203, 0x8A35B4E0, 0xC0000102, 0x00000000)"

Nothing new has been installed on this machine in months. The *only* thing
different is that on the last shutdown before this, SWMBO closed the lid before
the shutdown was complete. Whether this could cause XP/Vostro to get confused
over whether it should hibernate/suspend_to_disk or close down I don't know.

With the above screen displaying, the machine only responds to the power button.
On first viewing, it was restarted as suggested and the same screen reappears.
Subsequently, a second screen was reached which offers restart options (safe
mode, safe mode with command prompt, another I don't remember, and restart using
last good configuration). All return to the above blue screen.

We can get into the BIOS at boot. Nothing appears amiss.

Questions:

1. How did Dell/MS envisage one could run CHKDSK from this situation?

2. How can we know if there is a restore partition on this machine?

3. If there is a restore_part, does invoking a restore clobber any apps or
data, or just overwrite the O/S?

There are probably a dozen more I could ask, but these are the top ones at the
moment.

TIA for any constructive suggestions.
.