I know that people have posted about this before, but the replies don't really makes sense to me. I was using my mother's computer when it froze up, so I rebooted it. Since then, like so many other people, I can't get past the "windows is starting up screen". I've tried F8, safe mode, debugging mode, last good configuration, etc, but they all bring me back to that screen. I've heard something about the windows recovery console, or the boot cd, but it's an older computer and its not mine... I'm sure she doesnt have a recovery CD or anything like that around - and I don't want to lose any of her work files even if I were to reinstall windows somehow. :: What's Fixboot? What does that do? How do I use it?!

What happened to her computer, and what do I do now?! I swear if I don't fix this she'll have my neck

FIXBOOT is one of the possible commands run from the Recovery Console.

You can use the 6 floppy setup to access it:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=310994

What is the make and model of the computer?

In a worse case scenario you can slave that hard drive on another computer to extract the data.