Vicious BSOD startup cycle

Vista on my daughter's Toshiba laptop seems to self-destruct periodically. About 6 months ago it happened the first time. Would get to various points of booting, either black screen with only a cursor or a BSOD. Running the startup repair tool would sometimes fix it immediately, sometimes took more than one pass. I was not as aware of its limitations at the time. I was suspicious that the hard drive was intermittently flaky, although I do not recall seeing any specific messages besides device unavailable at some point. Upshot is that I put in a new hard drive and reinstalled Vista and she reinstalled all her programs and I got her files off the old drive which always seems to work fine if it's plugged in via a USB adapter.

For the last 2 months, she has been having intermittent boot problems again. It has degenerated to pretty much the same place we were last time. When you boot, you can see the BSOD flash by for part of a second. then it resets and starts over, endlessly. Same in all safe modes or normal mode. Boot off the DVD and the drive always seems fine. Here's what I know at this point:

the startup repair log said at some point 131074 Corrupt Boot Manager. I think this was during the Windows boot log diagnosis. At this point the startup repair tool says it passes all tests and says "Boot status indicates that the OS booted successfully."

BOOTREC /ScanOs and /RebuildBCD both list Identified Windows installations: 0

DISKPART lists the partition as active and the C: volume as healthy

CHKDSK says it "found no problems".

The recovery disk lists the Windows installation during its startup search for such.

With two different disk drives ending up with the same issue, I don't think the disks are the problem. I've alternately tried one memory sim at a time. I'm wondering if I can alter the registry flag from the recovery environment somehow to disable the automatic restart so that the actual BSOD appears. Vista doesn't seem to be creating a dump file for this crash that I can find anywhere. This is far more frustrating that anything I ever did with XP.

Does anyone know why BOOTREC doesn't identify the Windows installation when everything else seems to see it as OK?

I can reinstall Vista, again, but that is such a giant pain. I see enough other people that seem to have a similar problem, is this an inbred Vista problem or is there some hardware problem in this laptop that Vista is not very tolerant of?

Much thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Till a tech gets to you check C:/ windows/minidump files. Could be a driver problem. Have you checked to see if all your driver's are up to date?
Someone will get to you soon so hang in there.

As the original post says, there are no new dumps being created. I imagine that means the crash is too early in the startup process. I was really hoping to find what I needed there, too. So, when Vista reboots automatically and you get a screen that says unexpected shutdown detected, initializing and the percentage climbs until it gets to 100, What, exactly, is it doing? My daughter says that when the laptop is in one of its periods of being a pain that it will seem to freeze with intializing and some percentage showing. She's not terribly patient, so I'm not absolutely sure it is 'frozen', but I have not seen this happen at all.

OK. Finally solved this. I can't tell you how many hours have been wasted on this. I spent countless hours trying to track it down 6 months ago and quite a few again this time. You can actually run the gui regedit from the recovery command line. Who knew? Anyway, I killed the autorestart and finally got a look at the bsod. Happened in ianvstor.sys. Apparently either buggy turbo memory or buggy driver. This is apparently a common issue with this laptop as many others have the same symptoms without finding a solution. I renamed the driver file from the recovery environment and it rebooted perfectly. Has not done that for over a week.

Am going to run this laptop without the turbo memory for awhile and see what happens.