Profile Error and Extreme Slowness with XP

Hi all, first post here as I found this site through a websearch and it seems like the only shot short of bringing this laptop to a Circuit City, CompUSA,etc.

Anyways, my wife's Toshiba laptop randomly (or at least to us) just gave us this box during loading XP that would say there's a profile error so the default profile would be loaded accompanied by a 30 second counter (u can click ok next to it) and it basically gets you into Windows. The problem is it takes forever to load Windows and when it does the computer eventually freezes on you.

I've tried System Restore and it made no difference and when I hit F8 and I try to load safe mode it takes just as long but prior to loading safe mode a bunch of lines saying "mult-partition" along those lines with extended file names appear before getting into safe mode (which also has proven worthless as well). We've tried debugging mode and all of the other modes from the F8 screen to no avail.

No new programs were loaded in weeks so it's baffling, she was using it just fine a few hours ago, and then turned it on andthis occurred. Any help here is appreciated, I also tried opening control panel - add/remove programs to see if anything could be removed but the computer freezes shortly after trying to get the list of programs up.

Thanks in advance