So my mac had been crashing. Locking up solid, no way out save a forced reboot.

"Strange," I thought, "this machine has been quite reliable, and I have made no recent changes. Whatever could it be?"

I decide to run the disk util from the install cd. Kernal panic. Can't boot from the cd. Can't boot from the drive. More kernal panics. Varying startup issues. No problems booting into single user mode, I run fsck and it catches a couple things, so I think maybe that's it. [Repeat process from the beginning of this paragraph]

A hardware issue? I dig out the diagnostic cd and attempt another startup, holding down the option key. It freezes at the volume select screen. What the hell? I find that I am becoming frustrated. Okay, time to unplug everything and...

..then I notice it. The usb cable for my digital camera is plugged into the computer, as it always is, but instead of being draped around the handle of the G4, the baby male end, the end that sticks into the camera, has slipped and is resting against the side of my (metal) desk. I put it back up over the handle and all my startup and freezing problems are magically resolved.

The end.