?.,mnbv. appears under my hard drive icon

Hi all, on my desktops lower corner, the icon for my hard drive now has ?.,mnbv. just underneath the picture in small white letters. I tried to restart the computer, but it is still there! I have never had any problems with this machine until recently.

Our daughter moved in for awhile a few months ago, and was using it pretty heavily, it started doing the spinning color wheel thing (which had never happened before) so I looked up on the internet how to repair the disk permissions (which I have done twice) and that seemed to help. But now this!

Should I be worried? Is this the beginning of the end? I can not buy a new computer right now, thats for sure! Can I ignore it, and it might go away? If you have time to respond, please let me know if you have ever had this happen to you, or what your knowledge is about this weird symbol under the hard drive icon.

Sorry, I forgot to add that I am using osx 10.5.8 laptop. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I think you were right, I feel kind of stupid. I don't use it for more than one or two things (as you can probably tell) but I use it every day and it has become essential!
Thanks again, cheers!