Vista hangs on start-up; cannot load Windows

I can start my Toshiba Tecra A10 laptop in Safe Mode w/ Networking. But it hangs on the blue Windows screen (not the 'blue death' screen) on normal start-up.

I opened an email attachment several days ago and I believe this has caused my problem. I was over in the Malware forum but they could not find any problem. I suspect I cleaned it off before they could detect it. In any case, I got attacked, found it, cleaned it, and thought I was good. But that night the computer went into an auto-restart and when I went to it in the morning it was hung up.

I have tried repairing it and I have tried resetting to a restore point before the attack. Neither has worked.

Toshiba wants $30 in 'Shipping and Handling" and, more importantly, 7-10 days to send me a Windows installation disk. I want to avoid this if I can. I have backed up my Documents folder.

I am running Windows Vista Business, 32-bit with SP-1. When I try to download SP-2 it says I cannot do so in Safe Mode.

Any suggestions?

 

For anyone who is interested, this problem has been resolved!

The bad news is I am not totally sure how I did it. I tried updating Vista to SP2, per MajorGeeks recommendation, and could not. Nor could I install the readiness tool to do the same.

I then navigated my way to Microsoft's forum where a cross-referenced thread to my problem suggested using chkdsk. So I ran that, and while it was running, went to Thanksgiving dinner.

Had a Thanksgiving feast that couldn't be beat (ala Alice's Restaurant!!), and when I came home the computer had rebooted itself to the log-in page. Voila! Problem solved.

Thank you to everyone (and esp. MajorGeeks) for the resource to help me navigate to a solution to this. It saved me a ton of time and a bit of money as well!!