this is probably due to my lack of experience...but i'll post the 
question anyway...

I just had my linux laptop lock up...not sure why, but it completely 
locked up, so i had to shut it down manually and reboot.  On the reboot 
I got the message about the drives being uncleanly unmounted and it 
prceeded to to a fsck which it then stopped and had me log in and do it 
manually.... so I did.

I'm not to experieced with fsck or the file system itself... I have no 
idea what an inode is or what the messages are the come up during the 
scan.  It ask me if i'd like to repair my errors, I said yes to the 
prompts... fixing things is always a good thing......right?

So any way, it completed all it's checks and then I was able to boot up 
like  normal.  Now the real fun begins.... alot of my preferences were 
gone, and it came up with the default windowmaker desktop... fonts were 
back to defaults, my dock apps didn't load, Mozilla is missing filters, 
and several other things are no longer setup up.... can someone explain 
to me why this happend?  and how i can prevent it from happening in the 
future?