Help! Virus or hardware problem?

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Three times now this has happened to me ... I hear a siren type sound from my computer (not from the speakers) and my computer turns off. Then the siren stops.
One time I rebooted straight away, and the siren started up again immediately. The reboot went fine, and the siren stopped about 30 seconds later.
Makes me think it might be some hardware component overheating? I don't know.

Any ideas?

I'm guessing its a temperture alarm on your motherboard and the computer shutting down on alarm.

I would guess that Zach is correct. The question is, why are you overheating? Does your Mobo have a fan over the north bridge chip? If so, better check to see if that puppy is spinning or you'll end up with a fried board. Of course check the other fans too, but the ones over the CPU and north bridge (again assuming the latter is air cooled) are mission critical. The other thing you should do is, if you feel comfortable, pull the CPU heatsink/fan assembly out of the machine and go nuts with the canned air between the fins of the heatsink and the blades of the fan. Blow the dust out of the rest of the machine too, while your at it.

A lot of times excess dust build up causes these overheating issues. I was a LAN party once (only kind of parties worth attending imho), and one of my buddies did start randomly rebooting due to overheating. He's a programming genius but his hardware knowledge was significantly less than stellar, so he had no idea what was happening. Those of us with a hardware background popped open his case and took a look. We took one look at his, and I kid you not, literally FUZZY CPU heatsink/fan and said "Theres your trouble. You've got a dust Tarasque (big huge mean nearly impossible to kill D&D monster) masquerading as your processor!" So we pulled the assembly and took the canned air to it, but that only took off a surface layer of dust. Before it was all said and done we had to take swabs in between the fins and push solid blocks of dust out. They had the density of neutron stars, it was nuts!

OH! most import thing if you end up taking a similar route with the CPU assembly: when you go to put it back together, don't forget to put a little, and I mean little, dab of heatsink grease on the center of the processor before you put the heatsink back on and lock it down, otherwise you'll fry the chip. I recommend artic silver compound, it's really great stuff. Also, if you've got a fan on the side of your case, make sure it's blowing air out and not in, otherwise you'll just be sucking the dust straight back to to the processor.

Good luck!

P.S. There is one other thing I can think of that might be causing the "siren" noise and that could be your hard drive going kablooey (yes, that's a technical term ). Usually those make more of a "whirr rattle kerchunk kerchunk kerchunk" noise, but if the drive is just spinning at super top speed, it might also make a siren like noise. Hard to tell without actually being able to hear it.

Another less serious issue is a key might be stuck in the pressed position.