It's taken me two days to remove some kind of dodgy virus from my system.
The virus scanner picked it up and told me that it had removed it, but apparently it hadn't removed it completely... or something.

I'm not really sure what it was up to, but it prevented me from accessing certain websites (including this one), or just get to the homepage and then no further.
The whole system was running slow and browser windows were popping up all over the place (some broswer hijack also I'm guessing) and my restore points had all been removed which made it impossible to go back to a decent configuration.

After running several deep scans & such I managed to remove it through safe mode and downloading a repair file program from sourceforge.

So annoying, but at least it's all sorted now (hopefully) and I can get back in here.