Debian won't boot

[Vwaju <lou@manhattanhandyman.com>]

For months, I have been booting Debian 3.1 every day and experimenting
with networking tools.  Today I didn't do much except read man pages,
and I'm not aware of doing anything to change any configuration, but
when I rebooted my computer it stalled out at

INIT: Entering runlevel 2

After it hangs here, it starts printing out messages of the form:

Out of Memory: Killed process 2253 (sysklogd)

If I scroll back on the monitor, there are a number of messages like
this:

modprobe: FATAL: Error inserting pciehp
modprobe: FATAL: Error inserting shpchp
modprobe: FATAL: Error inserting hw_random
modprobe: FATAL: Error inserting rtc

 What is going on here?

Is there any way to boot in this circumstance?

Thanks, as always, for your thoughts.

Best Regards,
Vwaju
New York City