Free Computer blew up, need cheap fix

Here is the machine:Intel D915GAV, 2Gb memory, WD200 Caviar, DVD+R write, DVD read, G-Force4 MX 4000 and a generic USB2 card, 460W. Four fans!
XP Pro SE3, Lots of ordinary stuff like Avira, Spybot, Ad Aware, Photoshop 6, t-clock, Faststone Viewer, lots of photography related stuff I have never used.
Problem: One of those pop-up ads that Firefox can't stop telling me I have been infected and need to run THEIR anti-malware program now and just see if you can stop us hahaha. No, I don't remember which one.
What I did: To get the piece of junk off the screen I had to use C-A-D and close Firefox.
What happened: Firefox closed, wallpaper came up, machine froze. I used "start" to restart the machine. Windows loaded as far as "Windows is now starting". It will not go past that point.
Intrex Computers couldn't fix it.
The machine was free, you don't really think I have any of the disks, including the Windows full product XP, do you?
Now what do I do? I really don't want to buy a fresh copy of XP or 7.

What I have: My old Sony machine has all of the software I like on a 20Gb drive! It's a slug of a machine. I also have five WD drives of unknown condition, one says bad partition/bad sectors on a Post-it. It's a Seagate Barracuda 500Gb. There is a 400Gb WD plus three other 500Gb that say "?".

The Sony drive did not appear to be happy when I stuck it in the big machine and would not boot.

The 200Gb drive with the funky Windows XP from the big machine has a 9Gb folder with 20,00 pictures that I would like to recover.

I have more time than money if that changes your thinking.

 

Hmm... Well, the easiest fix to something like this is installing another Operating System. Now I'm not a master at this kind of stuff, but you could install a free linux operating system if you just need a computer... but of course, linux sucks. You could try Ubuntu 10.10 and then see if you could get to the pics from the drive, but I'm not sure that would work from a c.d. or flash drive boot. If you can get the computer to turn on and boot up again then you could go to command prompt and then check out your processes for the program, then do a search to find it. After you find it, terminate the process and delete it from your computer. Thats all the help I can give you, I'm just a 14 year old so decide on following my advice after the consolation of others.

 

Hi,
Have you tried booting into safe mode and restoring it to the last best known config? if you can boot into safe mode try the mallware/virus READ me/RUN me in the Mallware removal section of the forum and post your results there,it's tedious but could be worthwhile as it could be remedied.