Saved preferences in safari and desktop settings completely erased

I opened up Safari and suddenly realized that all of the saved bookmarks and preferences were gone, and the same thing happened when I opened up Firefox. So I thought restarting the computer might help.
However, after the computer (an eMac running 10.4.6) finished booting up, I noticed that all of the desktop preferences had been erased as well. Saved passwords, keychains, etc. all disappeared. The desktop background image was replaced with the default blue background. All of the saved dock preferences were gone and replaced with the default dock settings.
I was wondering what happened, if it is at all possible to fix, and/or if there is possibly a bug going around. Any help or information would be extremely appreciated. It would be awful if this happened the other macs at our office.

ducanedesigns,
How much free space is available on the hard disk? Is Filevault in use?
It is imperative that you have at least 10-15% of your hard disk available as free space in order that OS X can function without the threat of data loss.
Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk, also by Dr. Smoke will help you identify methods which you can use to increase the free space on your startup disk.
;~)

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