Actulice Problem now Windows won't boot

Factual Questions
1

My son managed to get Actulice pop up on his computer (Alienware AMD1400 running windows ME (Yeah I know ME))
Anyway now he cannot get the system to boot. It will come up in safe mode, but will not do a restore.
When he tries to boot in Normal mode, it starts seaching for new hardware (nothing new installed) and hangs there forever.
So we have three questions

  1. Could the Actulice case the booting problem?
  2. Do you think that doing an upgrade to XP is possible under these conditions? (machine won’t boot into normal mode)
  3. if an upgrade is possible I assume that the Actulice problem will still be there, correct?
    Thanks everybody
2

Bumpey, bump, bump.
Anyone? Bueller?

3

If you can boot into safe mode, then do Start-Run-‘msconfig’

Not sure exactly how it appears on ME, but I think there’ll be ‘startup’ and ‘services’ tabs - go to them, and deselect anything suspicious (just ‘untick’ them, don’t delete entries). Hopefully that’ll then let him boot normally and do a full virus scan, adaware/spybot etc.