[Loch-Ruadh] OT: Computer techie question

[Terry Sikes]

Our friend Tracy has an HP Pavilion dv8000 laptop that won't boot.  The Geek Squad at Best Buy kept it for a few days, but must have had a game of AD&D going on, because they didn't actually do anything to it except make a backup to DVD of her hard drives.  Finally one guy that had been a 3rd level fighter that was killed by a beholder gave it back to her and told her that he "thought it had a bad motherboard" and that it would cost about $1200 to replace.  
   
  I fired it up over the weekend and it will start up, gives the HP screen and load BIOS, then gives a screen that asks if you want to do a normal startup or start in safe mode.  Safe mode will not start, only gives you a black screen and about a page and a half of lines of file names, then stops and doesn't do anything else.  If you choose normal startup it gets to the Windows XP screen for 15 seconds or so, then goes to a blue screen that says "SESSION3_INITIALIZATION_FAILED."
   
  The laptop doesn't have a floppy drive, only a DVD drive and 2 hard drives.  She began having problems when she tried to install a broadband wireless card and the software for it.  Does anyone have a bootable CD or DVD that might get me to where I can uninstall the broadband software or get safe mode to boot?  Is there something else I can try?
   
  Terrence