System recovery will not complete - urgent help needed!

I have a Toshiba Satellite L500-1XD with Windows 7, which is just 4 or 5 months old. Yesterday when I turned it on, my user profile had effectively broken - it just couldn't be loaded. I took it in to the IT service at my university and he helped me to apply the recommended fix for this from Microsoft, but it didn't fully work and Windows 7 was now full of bugs.

So I then ran the system recovery discs that I made when I first got the laptop but something's gone wrong - it went through the whole process, but as it tries to set Windows up for first-time use, it suddenly shuts down and reboots. This process just keeps on repeating. I tried shutting it down for a few minutes by using the power button to see if that would change anything, but when I turned it on again, it still kept doing the same thing.

Does anyone know what I should do next? I can do basic admin tasks on a computer but this is way out of my area of knowledge. I'm in the final stages of writing a thesis which is overdue and am desperate to fix this immediately - any help much appreciated!

Wait - now it seems to have started working! I turned it off and left it for about 10 minutes this time - no idea if that's somehow reset something but it looks like it might be ok now. I'd still love to hear about if anyone can tell me if this is a known bug or what I should do if it comes back though...

Thanks, I'll give that a try. I'm a bit suspicious that Windows may have damaged something as the recovered system seems to have a few bugs now that it never had before. It's free of malware (I've already run malwarebytes plus I've put kaspersky on it) but maybe the diagnostic tests might pick something else up.

Thanks for your help!