OK, fixed it.
Did a hard reset, battery out etc.
Luckily there was a recent restore point 1 week back, an auto restore point at a Windows upgrade.
Ran that, it failed, ran it again, it worked. Few touch-ups and it's back 100%.
By hell it takes a long time though. For some reason this particular laptop takes about 4 minutes to boot, and the hard disk is working flat out for 10 minutes after that. It all took a long, long time. Hours of ticking over, doing stuff. Luckily you can just walk off and leave Vista to do its thing. Man that is so slow.
I think I'll tell him about disk images
