Once bounce with no start?

[Gwailo]

I was downloading a huge ZIP file with MSIE 5.1 last night, which seemed to go fine.

When I came to my computer in the morning, I could not get any applications to open. The icon bounced once in the dock, then settled back down with no black tick underneath. I could, however, open Terminal. When I did so I got my usual /etc/motd message as well as my login script, but I had a few strange errors like, if memory serves me "/users/[something] does not exist, operation cannot complete" or something similar.

I rebooted to console and fsck -y a few times until all the errors were gone. I rebooted and all my applications worked perfectly.

My question: what would cause such an error?

 

[Gwailo]

I have only seen one brownout in my life in this city: we have a rather plentiful supply of hydro power.

But thanks for the suggestion!