1) I reimaged a hard drive on a certain computer with a master image using Norton Ghost (which I use all the time without any errors or problems) and the computer simply wouldn't boot. I tried reimaging the hard disk, and trying hours-worth of troubleshooting and diagnostics with no success. Finally, in researching this on the internet, I came across someone that had a similar problem and they suggested that the memory went bad. Having nothing to lose, I removed the RAM module and replaced it with and new one. And guess what.. VOILA!!! It worked like a charm!!! It was the damn memory that was bad the whole time!!!

2) on my second instance (and on a totally different computer) I was simply downloading email from my mail server and the computer froze, and when I tried rebooting, I got the same error message: While initializing device vcache: windows protection error. Once again, I removed the ram and it worked as well.

Hope this helps anyone else experiencing the same thing.