XP, Blaster, and dead-in-the-water

The sequence of events goes like this. A friend has a quick laptop with XP Pro, and bought a new HP printer at Christmas. In attempting to install the drivers, the HP install disk would get to a certain point and just stop. She called HP (in India) and talked to them extensively, and they concluded that the CD was bad, so they sent her a new one. The same thing happened with the new one. She got fed up and brought it to me to see what I could do.

The CD worked fine on another computer, the CD ROM drive worked fine, so I started checking for other problems, and having connected to the 'Net I discovered that little Blaster window that informs you it's going to be shutting down in 60 seconds. Okay - found out she didn't have any anti-virus active on the laptop, so that's not really a surprise...

Downloaded the fix from Symantec, downloaded the patch from M$, did a bunch of clean-ups, Spybot, temp files, defragged, tried again. Still no joy - gets to the same point and stalls.

Okay, seems like it might be time to reinstall Win XP. Got the disk, started the reinstall, and guess what... Same thing. Got to 35% and hung all night.

Now I hear from my techie pal that - oh, silly me - I was supposed to run the Symantec remove tool twice, once in Safe-Mode, and that Blaster is probably (obviously) still in there.

Is there anything I can do now, short of reformat and start fresh?

 

I can't into Windows at all now. The install loops - I changed the BIOS to to try to boot from the CD and reintsall, but either way the setup hangs at the same point, apparently installing, but never getting past the "will finish in 35 minutes ". Stuck but good, I think.

 

I found out a little more - by restarting the install a few times, I finally located an error message.

Files Needed: The file 'asms' on Windows XP Professional CD-ROM is needed. Type the path where the file is located, and then click OK.

Having searched on that message, I ended up at the M$ Knowledge Base (has anyone ever mentioned to them that you can't read anything on their site without printing it?) and found that this whole problem seems to lead back to a registry problem ending in an inability to access the CD-ROM.

Any suggestions?