Not malware, not sure where to go from here

Hi: I posted to the malware thread regarding issues with my daughter's Acer laptop running vista and have had some very confusing issues. I will refer you to my original post, their suggestions and the outcome and pick up from there to save some time/redundancy http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=204349.

After the blue screeen/stop message and the battery drained on the laptop I (holding my breath) attempted to restart her computer and amazingly it booted. It finished the setup from the factory default install and loaded the Acer console and unfortunately, it got hung up on 2 of 14 steps. I was able to shut it down normally and reboot and unfortunately it was back to the same start up issue: power on/power off/power on/power off...... After a few minutes of that, I decided to press the power button and amazingly it booted to the Acer window and I got the following message (First time I had seen it) This file is possibly corrupt. The file header checksum does not match the computed checksum. Then I got the same stop message. Afterwards it asked to do a startup repair, and then once it was up I got the Acer stuff to finish all 14 steps. Ironically, while it was hung up, I was able to play a music CD in her CD drive, but once it had been rebooted and completed the steps(before the checksum message) , sure enough, it no longer played/read, and there is no sign of it having a CDrom installed again. Still no wireless card either.

Just in case it is still fixable, I loaded AVG 9 and spyware blaster, put Sbybot etc. in the download folder for later and configured the firewall just to keep it from developing a virus until I know what else to do. I am really out of my element here - still not certain whether this is a software issue or hardware. No CD drive means I can't reinstall from CD's - I had a partition to reinstall from.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Please do not double post.