Scan programs will not run

I am trying to help a friend get their desktop running again. Right now it freezes when trying to load into windows normally. Usually it will freeze right when the desktop background comes up. The mouse moves but explorer.exe never executes and ctrl alt del does nothing. It will boot to safemode with no problem. I have installed spybot and it will not run. The process is listed in the task manager but the program never comes up. I also tried combofix, superantispyware, and malwarebytes. Combofix will not do anything other than load into the process tree, same with superantispyware. Malwarebytes started to install but froze up on "finishing install" I changed the name of all .exe files before trying to run/install.

Any ideas on how to get this computer back up and running short of a fresh XP install?