Welcome screen and setup appeared out of nowhere!

I have G4 iMac, running 10.4.11. Upon logging out of my user, my iMac went to the welcome screen and the setup programme, as though I had just installed for the first time!
I decided to shut the machine down and now, when I restart, I get the gray screen and the apple shows up, but then it hangs and the fans start running.
HELP!!! What should I do?

Whew, we've got at the very least some Disk Corruption, occasionally this will work...
Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at bootup), if it eventually boots, run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, reboot when it completes.
(Safe boot may stay on the gray radian for a long time, let it go, it's trying to repair the Hard Drive.)
If not, "Try Disk Utility
1. Insert the Mac OS X Tiger Install disc that came with your computer, then restart the computer while holding the C key.
2. When your computer finishes starting up from the disc, choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu. (In Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you must select your language first.)
*Important: Do not click Continue in the first screen of the Installer. If you do, you must restart from the disc again to access Disk Utility.*
3. Click the First Aid tab.
4. Click the disclosure triangle to the left of the hard drive icon to display the names of your hard disk volumes and partitions.
5. Select your Mac OS X volume.
6. Click Repair. Disk Utility checks and repairs the disk."
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
If the Diisk checks out but you cannot still boot up...
Reset OS X Password Without an OS X CD...
http://theappleblog.com/2008/06/22/reset-os-x-password-without-an-os-x-cd/
Starts up like the first time you buy a new Mac, but after filling in all that info again, you should have access to the computer and the other Users & files will still be there... though I was just thinking, this new User probably shouldn't be the same name as an existing one.

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