New one on me, car 'puter crashed

[alpha channel]

A rather odd one this, the other day I set off home in my 159 oil burner and just as pulled out of the entrance the head unit turned itself off and seconds later it binged at me telling me that ABS wasn't available. Fine pulled over, turned it off and everything was dead, door nail dead, wouldn't do a damned thing.

I popped the bonnet poked my head under and made sure the connections on the battery hadn't somehow loosened themselves as the dealer put a new one on when I bought it (though stranger things have happened, an engine mount had loosened itself when I was putting back together my Rovers engine after a rebuild). As I straightened up I accidentally hit the lock button on the remote and it locked itself, a quick shrug, unlocked it and got back in. Key in the hole and it sprang back to life but everything had reset, clock, trip, etc... it's as if the thing had an ecu crash and had given itself a reboot.

Bizarre, anyone come across this sort of thing before? (I'll plonk this on alfaowner but I'll have to go looking for my log in details first so I thought I'd give it a whirl here first).

[alpha channel]

Well that'll keep me from power washing my cars (stopped ten years ago when a paint bubble I hadn't seen was blown off my old 214SEi). Thankfully as it stands it wasn't as bad as your GTV, my overall mileage hasn't been reset but it's something that I didn't even entertain a thought of (damn near everything else, it is an Alfa after all but not that sort of thing).