Help with Windows Vista Recovery

I need a little bit of help with this one. My sister gave me my Neices laptop to try and fix. Apparently they had been looking on the net, done a windows update and closed down the machine. Now the machine will not boot up and gives a black screen. Tried F8 to get me into safe mode or resore to last correct booting etc., it starts and runs the files then stops with a please wait message and does nothing more. I downloaded the recovery cd and this lets me run it to the point where it starts looking to repair files where there bar moves long searching. It gives me the message that this can take over an hour, but its still going!!

Is it now something other than a boot failure and this cd cannot help me? or am i doing something wrong. ARGH!!
 
Hi Terry,

Ok i did everying in the links to try to get this thing working, but still nothing. I have managed to find the Operating system DVD Disk which we have at work. Will that work. Would it be better if I bought Windows 7 and installed that over the top of vista? Its driving me nuts.

Addendum:

I managed to ctrl F10 and get into that screen, but it wont let me system restore to earlier good configuration, but it tells me restore wizard is running and there is no restore points. Did a HDD Check and that was fine, no errors. Tried to restore C drive to factory conditions and it freezes/does nothing so thats no good.
 
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A reinstall of Vista will cure the problem, but make sure that you quote the Windows key from your PC, not the one on the DVD.
It will lose all user data on the PC though, so you might want to get a live Linux download, burn it to a CD, boot it in "try without changing your PC" mode, and follow these instructions to rescue your user files before reinstalling.
 
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