I'm afraid I've given up. After 2 months of installing this to look at that and uploading crash dumps I've gone straight out for partitioning the HDD and reinstalling the OS. I will tranfser files from the old to the new and format the old. Thanks for the help peoples. I have important stuff coming up and the people who own this PC need it back soon so I went for broke.

There was an infection in the computer before I had it, so chances are that it corrupted the registry. Everything else on there is stuff I've done to try and get it working again (like trying to update the BIOS, which for ASUS is near impossible in safe mode).

Thanks again all. Love the support!!

Wowdude