Hanging on "loading personal settings"

Brain Date: March 7th, 2010, 6:08pm
I recently received a Windows XP Home machine that has been hanging at the log in "Loading Personal Settings" for a good ten (10) minutes.  Yeah, I waited that long.

In any case, I was able to boot up to safe mode and have found out that it does NOT have an antivirus program.  Hm, strange.  Let's see what we can do when we upload one.  My weapon of choice:  AVG Free Edition.  I'll be right back.

Brain Date: March 7th 2010, 6:32PM
MSVC Distributables Installation Failed error during AVG installation.  Buggers.  Downloading now from Microsoft.

Brain Date: March 7th 2010, 8:15pm
Despite thinking that doing a registry cleanup, or otherwise (Microsoft Cleanup Utility), I still have the same issue, no matter what I tried to install.  So I went to ComboFix which uncovered TONS of problems, one of them being a rootkit.

Brain Date: March 7th 2010, 6:35PM
Downloaded and attempted to install.  Error from "Windows Installer" "The system administrator has set policies to prevent this installation."

My conclusion:  This baby is hijacked.  On to the next one: ComboFix.