Windows can easily get into a mess as described without necessarily there being any damage to user-installed programs and their data.

Replying to myself in even more embarrassment.

It IS Windows 7. Turns out his son - an army IT guy - had upgraded it to W7 Pro, he's now sent me the licence key.

When I get chance to spend some more time on this, rather a hectic few days at the moment, I'll try some of the suggestions on here and elsewhere I've posted.

If all else fails, I'll try to pull off the My Documents data and do a re-install using my Win 7 Pro disc.

Also I've now found that the owner has ordered one of these from Amazon. not sure whether to try it - though will check it for viruses beforehand - or not. I'm somewhat suspicious so any knowledge or thoughts?

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Isn't it likely the friend wants to preserve their programs and data?

Given that I can get to a DOS prompt I would hope to be able to copy off My Documents to a USB stick.

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

Also I've now found that the owner has ordered one of these from Amazon. not sure whether to try it - though will check it for viruses beforehand - or not. I'm somewhat suspicious so any knowledge or thoughts?

If you have your own Win 7 Pro disc I'd use that instead. You can also download Win 7 directly from Microsoft if you have a valid product key: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/wi...

Have you tried a Repair Install (Method 2 here)?

https://www.pcgamer.com/how-to-repair-a-faulty-windo...

[Replying to the latest post for convenience]

To close this one down.

Sadly none of the suggestions here or elsewhere sorted it. Even when I got into the Safe Mode selection screen going for normal Safe Mode sent me into the startup repair loop.

Given the time I'd already spent trying to recover I decided to abandon that approach. Loaded Mini-XP from Hirens CD and copied off all the My Documents files. Then using my Win 7 Pro DVD reinstalled Win 7 (in fact during this it copied the previous installation, especially the data, into Windows.old). Then after installing - slowly - 200+ updates, the AV they'd been using and running AV & Malware checks it all looked ok.

So it's now gone back to its normal home.

I'd forgotten though how slow a 2GB PC is, especially trying to run 2 (or more) programs at a time!

Tweak it to hell, or download more RAM.