There's something in the water

There's something in the water laptops are drinking, and it isn't the healthy kind. I know three people who have experienced some kind of "blue screen of death" over the last week:

My friend George (Error message unknown)
My friend Dave's mom (Error message: cannot find System32 files)
My friend Zombamazomba (Error message unknown)

Now, laptops fail all the time, but it's interesting that three people I know have had laptops fail in such a quick span of time. I'm betting there's something going around.

Now, I did manage to fix my friend's mom's laptop, which originally gave the following error upon startup:

STOP: c0000218
The registry cannot load the hive(file):
\SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE
or its log or alternate.

It is corrupt, absent, or not writable.

Beginning dump of physical memory.
Dumping physical memory to disk:"

In order to fix this, I first loaded the original Windows XP SP1 disc that came with a different computer and managed to boot from the disc. Then I accessed the recovery console and entered the following lines:

md tmp
copy C:\windows\system32\config\system C:\windows\tmp\system.bak
delete C:\windows\system32\config\system
copy C:\windows\repair\system C:\windows\system32\config\system

This allowed the computer to reboot as normal, recovering the System32 files it was unable to locate originally. I don't know what my other friends' problems are, but if they are related to this issue, there's the solution.

As for what's causing this, I'd like to say a virus, but it's unlikely. It's possibly some kind of rampant registry error common among these types of laptops.