Ok so I tried to rid my girlfriends comp of the billions of viruses, trojans, etc before checking my banking online. I downloaded Ewido and cleaned the system - Over 8000 objects out of 180000 were infected - then decided to clear up a few of the startup processes to speed up the start-up speed.
Then when returning to the computer after i remembered that I actually wanted to use it before I spent so long trying to sort it out, I found that when I tried to logon it logged me straight back off (happens in all options of safe mode too).
After some research on my own computer it seemed that the problem came from one of the trojans which was deleted but leaves the above problem as it replaces userint.exe with wsaupdater.exe. I can't get the infected PC to boot from the Xp CD, I presume this is from the many scratches!
I the set up the HDD as a slave in my PC but couldn't work out how to access the regedit for the slave drive rather than my own master HDD.
On closer inspection of my girlfriend's system32 folder however, the file userinit.exe is still there and there is no wsaupdater.exe anyway. So I now think I must have disabled the userinit when altering the startup processes.
Opinions and cures please!!! The faster the better, my girlfriends mum is not an 'appy chappy
PS - I tried msconfig and running ewido again once I hooked it up as slave but found the same probs as when I tried regedit - It simply uses the master drives settings
Thanks in anticipation
Ian