IS it virus attack?

Hello,
I am using Windows XP machine with Service Pack2 and Mc- Cafee Antivirus.Yesterday night when i am working on System suddenly power went and as i wont have UPS system is shut down.

When i switched on the system it is not at all loading windows. Then i went to safe mode run scandisk then windows loaded.Then i want to open control panel it is showing that not a valid Win32 application.

Anybody help me regarding this.All icons in my desktop have changed to .lnk form i dont know what is this it might be virus attack.

Please anybody help me to get solution for this problem.

It sounds to me like a power surge caused the failure, which might have made it through the cables and frizzed somedata on the hard drive if the surge made it to the read heads, or maybe there was a critical file that was being modified when the system lost power.

I would suggest restoring the system from a restore point (if you use those) or a repair disk, ehich could copy all the critical files back over.

First thing I'd do is runa surface scan through scandisk... this will take a while, but if there are bad sectors, it might be able to repair them...

And like striek said... restore...