Netbook freezing?

I've had my netbook just under a year, and it was working perfectly fine until yesterday.
I mainly use my computer for school or to watch the occasional show off of my hard drive.
I had it running all day, doing work at school and typing up one of my lectures.
When I got home that night, I tried to plug in my hard drive and it froze. That that wasn't too
uncommon. So when nothing else would work, I have it a hard reset and then rebooted my computer.
This time however when it turned on, I got a popup stating :
One or more of the following gadgets raised an exception and was terminated abnormally:
Scratch Pad
Do you wish to disable the above gadgets now?
If I click 'yes' my computer freezes and I can't do anything but hard reset. If I click 'no'...same story....
I don't know what to do with my computer. I've restarted it so many times since last night it can't be healthy.
I even let the entire battery drain and then fully charged it before trying again, and I get the same thing happening all over
again.
Does anyone know how to fix this? I would really appreciate not having to send it off.

 

It would help knowing which model netbook you have, since they each have different hardware and software configurations.

A general troubleshooting method in these situations is to boot into safe mode, uninstall the problem software (Scratch Pad), then try to reboot normally, and if it works you can then try reinstalling the software that had issues.