cannot log

Hello. I am an IT professional to a friend's PC

He is a professional DJ well established in my country and also amateur producer and he badly needs his windows PC for his work. All his applications are legitimately acquired including windows XP Pro, the O.S.

Now the problem: one day he left PC on, unattended, sharing his produced mp3s via SoulSeek (I think it was SoulSeek). When he returned to the PC, he found more than 50 firefox windows open and when he closed all of them he saw a pop up notice that his PC will be updated in the next reboot.

Since then we cannot log into windows, no matter what we do. Even safe mode or "Previous good configuration" have the same result:

I am on the "windows log on welcome screen" and whatever I do, when I click administrator or user, it opens the desktop for seconds only, displaying loading settings and immediately after settings loaded, I return to the welcome screen again, displaying "logging off" and then "saving settings".

In order to save me from recovery of his files and subsequent format, I would like to see if there is a work out.

His security programs, which I advised him to buy and I use also (with the addition of RTD and FD-ISR), are:

NOD32 2.7 - SAS real time protection - Windows XP firewall

Also I cannot repair with his Windows XP CD.

Thanks

 

Can you get to system restore by the command prompt?

Hit f8 while booting up.
Select Safe Mode with Command Prompt option
Log on as Administrator - type password if needed or press enter if no password.
Type c:\windows\system\restore\rstrui.exe then press enter. Or type %systemroot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe

This should open system restore. Then restore back to before the problem date.

 

I will try this, but the problem is that I cannot log. After 3-5 seconds I am logged off. I think I don't get the chance to give any command prompt.