Vista - lost network connection

I have a friends laptop (hp dv5003cl), XP Pro. That they used to surf the naughty sites and caught a nasty bug of some kind. When booting up it acts normal for the first 1 minute, then BAM, this pc scanner program pops up and starts scanning for a couple of minutes then and error message pops up and then keeps poping up and filling screen. I manage to get into safe mode with networking and do a system restore to the computer know earliest date. All seemed well, then update from MS and all still seemed well. Then I got this message that the WLAN is not connected. I have a secured wi-fi router. So I tired to manually input wi-fi connection and still can't connect wirelessly. I uninstalled driver and rebooted, found new hardware and installed orginal driver and still no connection. So went to HP and updated driver and still nothing. I couldn't check if connection was good before because of bug. Short of a complete reinstall, anybody have any ideas. I'm completey lost. I know this is for vista but this is my one true fourm for my pc woes. Thanks for any help.