XP Will Not Load Up

My borther phoned me and told me about his problem.

He and his mate were on the net and they downloaded something that he can not remember the name of but it was something like Line something or Lime something.

What ever it was it sent his computer crazy and he was forced to reboot the machine.

The machine boots up and will go to the page where you can choose to run in safe mode or normal mode. No matter what my brother choses the computer reboots itself and goes right back to that page.

I told him to reinstall XP but the dozy sod has gone and lost the CD.

Does anyone have any idea at all if this could be a virus?

***UPDATE***

I just spoke to my brother and asked him what he downloaed and he said it was a P2P program so I threw the name Limewire at him and he said that was the chap.

Limewire should not have made his computer act like that though, should it?

no limewire shouldn't .. its the same as shareazza, bearshare and morphious ... all i does is connect to search engines and download stuff .. I have installed it and removed it without effecting my pc.

sounds like a virus to me : (

get him to run a hijack and post or email it to you to be posted here.

Hi Static, thnaks for the reply,

I would happily get him to run the hijackthis program and post a log up but he can not get past the page where you pick which mode to run windows in.

Whatever one he picks it reboots and comes right back to that page again.

Would a reinstall help at all?

Tell him to get with another person that has a updated anti-virus program and get a rescue disk from him. It does sound like a virus came through the download though.