Strange boot issues

Hello,

They couldn't figure this out at techsupportforum.com so this may be a challenge for ya!

First of all, here is a link to what happened at their site:
W32.Blaster.Worm -- Missing Boot Manager - Tech Support Forum

As a recap of what's going on, Windows started stalling after boot up, and during the login screen at bootup. Startup Repair said that the bootmanager was missing. Trying bootrec through Recovery Console didn't seem to help. The computer would randomly boot into Windows and randomly stall at the glowing orbs. When it did boot completely, I had no network connectivity. The system would stall when I would do any of the following: right click on network icon and click Troubleshoot, try to Diagnose network problems, uninstalling and then reinstalling network device drivers (would stall when starting to reinstall them automatically).

When I ran chkdsk d: /f /r at recovery console (C: is normally my boot drive, but typing C: in the recovery console says that the drive is corrupt, I think my F: is actually the first drive in the hardware, which is why it says this), it said that the Master File Table had a corrupted BITMAP (it was allocated as empty but contained information, I think), and supposedly fixed it successfully. When I re-ran chkdsk, there were no issues. A restart did not solve the problem.

I booted in Safe Mode and ran sfc /scannow through an elevated command prompt but it said "Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations."

My system generally does not boot into a Safe Mode with Command Prompt nor into Safe Mode with Networking. Sometimes it doesn't even boot into Safe Mode, but generally that has been working.

A strange that happened during this whole process is that my second HDD, F:, was somehow formatted or corrupted. I might have a virus on this machine, because these problems started when my laptop became infected, but no rootkits came up during scanning and no boot problems happened with my laptop. The two computers were connected with folder sharing through my router.

I have access to my installation CDs (Win 7 Professional retail), the Win 7 recovery CD, and a System Image done about 7 months ago on my external HDD. I wouldn't mind just re-installing, but I know you can't do that in Safe Mode.

Hopefully this problem is driver oriented and not in hardware.

Thanks for helping!

System info:
Windows 7 Professional 32 bit retail installed over a Windows XP machine 1 year ago
Acer Aspire AST180
never re-installed Windows 7
bought the desktop used

Perfmon report:
It said that the specified path was not found.

I'd like to explore other options first.

I ran hard drive diagnostics from Hitachi and Seagate for both of my drives in the long/advanced modes.

They found no problems.