XP Home hanging, or restarting at splash screen...

I have in front of me:

HP Pavilion (not mine)
Win XP Home

When I start this up, it will either hang, or reboot after sitting on the animated windows splash screen (never makes it to log on screen).

On reboot, it says that windows did not start the last time what would I like to do, and give sme the usual options.

It WILL start in safe mode.

I have tried system restore many times, and still won't boot.

If, when in safe mode, I try launching Internet Explorer, it will crash and ask if I want to send an error report to M$.


I'm sure I'm overlooking something.. but I'm trying to avoid a system wipe here.. any help would be wonderful..

Thanks..

Lee

UPDATE::

I can now get it to boot to the OS. Nortan 2004 had corrupted .DLLs that wouldn't register, so I uninstalled that and installed AVG. Now, it won't go through a full virus scan without hanging up, in regular or safe mode.

I can get IE to run and do have internet connectivity through lan. No longer an issue there...

They had hot llama media player installed, AVG would hang while scanning one of its .DLL files. I uninstalled hot llama, scanned again.. AVG still hangs

Installed and ran adaware, same thing.. it hangs part way through scanning and won't complete a scan in regular or safe mode.

If I wait long enough, the 'windows' folder will open.. it is slow to browse through tho.

Installed Spybot, updated and ran fine.. found some minor tracking cookies, removed.. worked fine.

Attempted to run HiJackThis. Program will not run in regular or safe mode. Gives me an application error.. (Application failed to initialize properly) and gives a Hex #..

Again.. any help, would be grand..

Lee

Thanks for the help, but I figured it out.

After checking out the event viewer (which I should have done first), I noticed several enteries in the System Log. They were errors indicating that the hard drive had at least one or more bad blocks on it. That would cause the "random" errors, stalled scans and such. As it would read the block, it would crap out.