By 24rs ago I had enough. It was reminiscent of bad old days. Possibly an overload of inherently mild enough malware, which by the time I saw it, had something so corrupt or threadbare from every sort of cleaning device we were down to the boards.

I did collect all his old data in various formats some of which he will copy back as he wants.

On booting, Safe mode was fine throughout, but Normal persisted in starting, and then more by time than activity, dragging until it froze and had to be switched off. The cursor moved, would show the tiny circle but nothing else happened.

I had cleared 1 Trojan dropper (Malwarebytes) and 58 bits of trackers in Spybot. Had tried system restore, various repairs and so on.

Was able to run chkdisk with absolutely no fuss from the program, so able to reassure him that his HD was OK, but the numbers of boots, and reboots all with the password needed at every opportunity, time wasted if I expected a procedure to complete while I was away.

A pleasure when we agreed to use the ultimate Restore-to-factory-condition. It was silky smooth, and my grandson was quite happy to take it home to load the various programs and configurations he wants.

Perhaps the method offered by rdave13 would have worked given time, but this laptop was being revived 4 miles from home and I didn't want to meddle with his Net-related settings, which could have been at the core of his trouble.