Why did my Linux Mint system crash?

[joe at actionline.com]

This morning I was working on my system fine, no problems, but then I
lost my Internet connection. I got it restarted by entering the password,
but could not access the Internet even though both the router and the
'net connection icon on the start line indicated that I was connected.

I had this happen once before, several days ago, and when I rebooted the
system everything worked fine again.  So after several more attempts to
re-establish the connection, I finally rebooted again, and and after
starting to boot up, I finally saw a screen full of messages including
"unable to handle kernel paging request" and "Xorg tainted."

See screen shots I took with my camera phone here:
http://www.upquick.com/temp/z1.jpg
http://www.upquick.com/temp/z2.jpg
http://www.upquick.com/temp/z3.jpg
http://www.upquick.com/temp/z4.jpg

What in the world could the problem be and how can I resurrect my system?

(PS: I'm writing this message from my laptop. Tried to ssh login to the
failed system, but no joy.)