Well it's been a very trying time figuring out what went wrong with my desktop but I was finally able to solve the problem. Simply put, it seems that my desktop decided it no longer liked all of the memory being installed (4 Gigabytes), so I simply removed one bank (half the memory) and things are working once again.

In fact, things are working much faster and I've already contacted Intel to report the problem and hopefully, it will only require a bios update to permanently fix it; otherwise, it means sending the board into them for replacement (1 year warranty).