That sucks. Luckily I haven't had that happen, and I've been trying to do regular backups of My Documents to another computer, though I'd still lose stuff like the digital versions of some stuff I shot with a digicam and other huge things.
I think I'm getting close to one as well. My computer has just seemed slow lately. Plus, other wierd things have been happining.
My wireless tray icon went missing for some reason. Wireless Ethernet still works, so I'm not too worried about it. For about a week, sometimes my computer would lock up right after logging in, but I fixed that by restoring to the oldest restore point and then doing chkdsk /r. Then today, I was installing SQL Server Developer Edition and something was telling me I needed admin rights. I looked, and sure enough I'm in the Administrators group. So I try it from the Administrator account and get the same thing. Huh? Then I ran the desktop cleanup wizard in the admin account and come back to my own account and most of the icons are missing, but they aren't in the unused desktop items folder.
I hope it lasts because this instance of the install isn't really all that old. Not even one year.