vmm32.vxd problem. HELP!!

I have a system that i built. An Asus k7V-rm board, 550 athlon, 128mb pc133 ram, 15gb maxtor 7200rpm hdd running at 66mhz, diamond stealth 3 16 mb 4x agp video card, motorolla 56k modem, onboard sound, nec readiscan scanner. System ran like a dream for 3 months, never overclocked it but it benchmarked higher numbers than the same system with 600 athlon using sondra2000. Then yesterday out of the blue i get an error at bootup saying error reading drive c:
so i ran scandisk which found a ton of errors after which i restarted. when i restarted the win98 logo comes up, then back to dos and it says vmm32.vxd is required to run windows, if it is missing from your PATH you may need to reinstall windows. Can I possibly fix it without reinstalling the o/s?
what would cause the problem? The only thing i did different was install a new mouse driver but i had restarted the system once after that without a hitch. i had a simlilar problem on a friends computer once and could never fix it even formatting the hard drive. please send any help you can. thanks eric

did you run a surface scandisk? maybe your hard drive has developed bad clusters? i use the line scandisk c: /autofix/surface

i tried that. same thing. vmm32.vxd is missing.

In your autoexec
add
c:\windows\system\vmm32\
to your system path...

If that doesnt fix it..

Ya need to reinstall windows fresh (reformat drive).

-Machine

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