Escalating Problem

Hi everyone. Hoping you could help me out.

Yesterday evening I was updating the full version of my antivirus software when I received a blue-screen error message about three-quarters of the way through installation. (This only took up the center of the screen and didn't appear to be the "blue screen o' death" that is often spoken of among the Windows community). I didn't think anything of it until the computer halted my Internet connection and then froze up.

"No problem," I thought. "I'll just do a hard-restart; things like this happen all the time." I flicked off the power switch, then turned it back on and tried to reinstall the updated software again. Same problem.

"That's odd." I brought up the "Windows 7 Action Center" and saw the "System Restore" button located at the bottom, so I tried to restore it to the day before yesterday, when everything was running normally. The restore went through its normal procedure, but then when the computer had rebooted I got this message:

"System Restore did not complete successfully, Your computer's files and settings were not changed.
Details;
System Restore could not access a file. This is probably because an anti-virus program is running on the computer . Temporally disable your antivirus program and retry System Restore.
An unspecified error occurred during System Restore, (0x80070005)"

I disabled my antivirus and attempted the system restore again, but got the same message. "Whatever," I thought, then decided to try to re-install a different anti-virus software.

Problem was, my wireless internet connection (which had been terminated when all this nonsense started originally) still was not working (which is unusual) and I brought up a troubleshooter. The troubleshooter suggested that my wireless adapter's driver might be out-of-date and to get a new one (but I can't get on the internet).

That's when I got the idea to fire up my old PC (this one that I'm on now, which is running Windows vista) to try to figure out all this nonsense. When I went to restart my HP TouchSmart tx2-1375dx (my "main" computer, and the one currently giving me issues), it had locked up again. Time for another hard restart.

Click. I turned it on again. And got into the "safe mode" option. Seemed like a good choice; I could just uninstall whatever the problematic software was (I had reason to believe it was my anti-virus update) and try again, right? Wrong. The computer locked up again as I was loading up "safe mode".

Another hard restart, only this time it led to the "Run Startup repair (recommended)"/"Start Windows Normally" option. Is there anything I need to know about this to restore normal PC function?

Sorry this question read like a JRR Tolkien novel. Also, I'm not very computer savvy, so I can't tell you very much about the specs.

Thanks for your time.

I have found that AV tamper protection interferes with system restore. You need to specifically disable that before it will complete.

Welcome
Sounds very much like as BSOD. Follow instructions and you wil receive excellent help.
Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) Posting Instructions

Will I be able to use these files on my Windows 7? I can't even get Windows to boot up; it looks like it's going to and then kicks me to that "Startup Repair" option and/or locks up on me before Windows successfully loads.

===UPDATE===

I got it to go into "Safe Mode" without any problems. Currently running the BSOD program from that link that Rich recommended me. Let's see if this works.

===UPDATE===

Was unable to run the perfmon /report which is mentioned on the Blue Screen of Death page, due to an "unspecified filepath" or something like that. However, everything else ran and came up normally, and I'm about to post the report.