XP Home Hangs at Welcome Screen

Hello,
I am helping a friend with her XP home desktop. She was running AVG 9.0 and having some problems so we tried to upgrade to 12. The upgrade could not uninstall 9.0 and I would up having to download the AVG removal tool. The removal tool ran for a little while and then hung for like 20 minutes so we shut off the computer and restarted it. When we restarted it it would get to the Windows XP Welcome screen and just hang there even in Safe Mode. I then thought I had to do a system repair from the XP disk. She has 2 CD drives and I wound up having to disable one in the BIOS for it to boot from the CD. It got about 30% through the recovery and kept giving me errors that it couldn't write a file from the disk. I tried switching to another XP Home disk and the same thing. I had to quit the repair and now the computer just blue screen whenever i try to boot it. It also blue screens when I boot from the XP Home CD at the point where it says "Starting Windows". So now I can't do anything and I'm kind of at a dead end. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks so much

Sounds like there may be a problem with the hard drive.

You might want to consider getting XP up and running on a new hard drive, slave the old hard drive in, and then copy what you can over to the new hard drive.

If diags then prove the old drive is ok, repartition and format it and use it for backups.

Ditto. I'd say the system is so messed up that trying to fix it could be harder than hard.

And if it's failing because of a mechanical problem, fixing it isn't really an option. :(