Vista Repair

Hello everybody,

I'm having numerous problems with a friend's Dell XPS1730 and Vista. To make a long story short, (aside from some of the other problems,) the first sign of problems was spider solitaire would hang when we tried to load it.

Dell's resolution was to use the other solitaire program. (Great resolution lol!)

A little while down the road we decided to install SP1. Everything went fine until it hit the file spidersolitaire.exe and it froze up. Now it will not boot into vista. At boot time it is doing some process. It just shows white text on a black background listing file names. Eventually it gets to spidersolitaire.exe and locks up again. I'm not sure if this is a new chkdsk or part of the sp1 installation that I'm seeing, but it never gets past this file.

I have tried last known good, as well as safe mode, but neither boots to windows.

Is there a way to repair this or to backup without losing all my friends pictures and files etc?

Does a vista repair installation erase documents and pictures?

Thanks
Jim