Startup Repair fails on boot. But no fault using Win 7 DVD

Trying to fix a friend's PC problem. It's an Acer desktop PC / Win 7 Home

When it boots it displays "Windows is loading files" then goes into Startup Repair which duly fails "Startup Repair cannot repair this computer automatically". Viewing problem details it says "Problem event name: Startup Repair Offline". The PC is actually on a working Ethernet connection but at this point in starting may well not see the network.

Under View Diagnostic and Repair details it lists numerous attempts at repair but at the end of the log is "Startup Repair has tried several times but still cannot determine the cause of the problem".

I've tried booting from my old Win 7 Pro DVD, that duly loads; on the second screen I selected Repair this computer, then selected the Windows 7 installation on the System Recovery Options screen.

Tried Startup Recovery, that finds no problems.

Tried SFC /scannow from a command prompt, that responds that there's a system repair pending that requires a reboot to complete.

There's no recovery disc - though I'm not sure if that would actually help in this situation. I've tried to start in Safe Mode but F8 during boot is having no effect.

There's no image to restore from.

I'm not sure how to progress this one. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

To close this one down.

Sadly none of the suggestions here or elsewhere sorted it. Even when I got into the Safe Mode selection screen going for normal Safe Mode sent me into the startup repair loop.

Given the time I'd already spent trying to recover I decided to abandon that approach. Loaded Mini-XP from Hirens CD and copied off all the My Documents files. Then using my Win 7 Pro DVD reinstalled Win 7 (in fact during this it copied the previous installation, especially the data, into Windows.old). Then after installing - slowly - 200+ updates, the AV they'd been using and running AV & Malware checks it all looked ok.

So it's now gone back to its normal home.

I'd forgotten though how slow a 2GB PC is, especially trying to run 2 (or more) programs at a time!