Will doing a system recovery (not restore) get rid of viruses?

A friend of mine got a computer from someone on his delivery route (a Doctor with more money then patience :-D ).

The stats on the system are:
Athlon 64 X2 5000 With Vista
3 gig ram
400 gig HD
Geforce 8300 (PCI Express)
Yup, the Doctor just got fed up with it and gave it to John. Incredible huh!

The computer seems to have issues because of malware that's on it. Would doing a system recovery (not a restore), that would set the computer back to factory settings (and I believe format the drive) get rid of the malware that's on it?

 

Unfortunately I would be doing the recovery from the partition (which just finished). I'm about to load avira anti-virus on and do a check. Would that also check the partition?

 

Well, I did the recovery factory install. After that was done I booted into safe mode loaded and ran MacAfee stinger and stinger conficker. Then I had to boot into regular mode to install avira anti-virus.
Near the end of that installation the computer froze. I rebooted into regular mode and avire seemed to have installed ok. So, I then ran the avira program. About 2/3rds into running it the computer froze again. I don't know if this is a software, virus, or hardware problem now. I'm running memboot now to chech memory. Any suggestions on what else to try if the memorys ok?:confused