Have a firends son's Vista machine here - Toshiba A500 running a Celeron 2.5GHz and 4GB RAM.

Now I haven't much history one this one because the son is not contactable right away so have ploughed on anyway.

One thing is for sure the battery is dead and it only runs on adaptor. The boot takes anything from 4 - 6 minutes and I have tried to get into Control Panel and programs etc but everything takes so long to load if at all.

I have tried booting with a Ubuntu and Linux Mint disk and can get onto the net to try and download CC and Malwarebytes but even that doesn't work.

I cannot get into regedit to see if anything in there is ok and it seems to randomly do what it likes - even a chkdsk that took all of four minutes before going back to the main page.

Now the sad thing is that it is a very well looked after machine but full of stuff like Frostwire, Limewire, iTunes that wretched Registry mechanic and short of doing a factory default which I still don't reckon will work I just am lost to what to try.

Apparently this machine has been back to the dealers on a couple of occasions and whoever had the HDD out cross threaded one of the retaining screws and I cannot even get that out to try an old 7 drive I have.

Any ideas please?

I'd go straight for the reformat/reinstall option - with the symptoms you are showing it's likely to be impossible to clean it properly, and if you tried it could take days to weeks to do it anyhow.
Have you tried Safe Mode with Networking, and installing/running MBAM from there?

Hiyya Noel since I posted that I have been able to get onto the net and download CC and MBAM. I actually had to run the CC in safe mode in the first instance and the first MBAM scan which I did not include the file system to be a little quicker.

Now I have deleted a lot of very suspect apps ( a lot of P2P ones) but the boot still takes 8-10mins and clicking on an app takes at least 4 mins to open it.

I have found 33 trojans with MBAM and removed 34GB of rubbish with CC done a thorough defrag, SFC /scannow, chkdsk, and run the Kaspersky TDSS Killer in case it has a rootkit lurking. The SFC did say there was some corrupt files that could not be fixed but I have plodded on.

No rootkits and the last full scan with MBAM turned up the last two trojans.

What I don't get is that the HDD runs real fast in safe mode but in a normal boot just ticks away almost like a clock - real regular and not the frenetic clicking one usually hears.
I am going to run a Seatools check later tonight to see what the HDD is like as perhaps it might be going south.

There are two other problems one is the usual no disk - rescue or installation and the cover for the HDD has one of the screws cross threaded in and th head stripped out so replacing it is going to be hard.
I have told the friend that to fix this one will take a new HDD and maybe a 7 OS and given the battery is cactus the repair bits as I can only get them retail are worth more than the fixed machine would be.
It is a shame really as it has been looked after on the outside the inside however wrecked with P2P and Apple apps and I also found that Registry Mechanic app in there too so who would know what the dickens is wrong with it. Clearly the security (Norton) has not been very effective IMHO and it seems that just when I have got on top of things it slows up again.

try installing the IRST drivers....

This may simply be caused by a bad set of Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers -

Installing the Intel Rapid Storage Drivers
try downloading and installing them from here - http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=2101&DwnldID=21730

Once complete, please reboot twice, then post another MGADiag report.

...oops! sorry about the irrelevance at the end - I assume you're not seeing Validation/Activation problems?

Once that's done, run another SFC scan and upload the CBS.log somewhere (or compress/attach it) so we can take a look.

Ok Noel will try but how long can you hold your breath? I think we might just invest in some scuba gear with this one LOL!!