big problem with a laptop

[quinnTE]

what happened was that my friend asked me to help with his laptop because he was getting popups and some other problems. everything was going ok until i managed to get some viral software on there, then the whole system went nuts. before the software (norton 2005) even finished installing, it started popping up virus alerts all over the place and forced me to reboot using the power button.
when it came back up it was going incredibly slow (when i right-clicked something it would take almost 2 minutes to bring up the menu) and i used the task manager to find out that a file called "winlogon.exe" was staying at 95-100% cpu time; and of course i couldn't shut it down because it's a critical system resource.
so i try to be patient and just run norton at super-slow mode to take care of the virus, only since it didn't finish installing, it won't run and the uninstallation got corrupted so i can't uninstall it. i tried reinstalling it, but it says it "can't remove the previous version" and shuts down the installation.
the only other thing i knew to do was to remove it the hard way using regedit, which i've never had a problem with before. i did a search for and removed everything containing "norton" or "symantec" and all seemed well until i rebooted. now it's saying that the "c:\windows\system" folder is corrupted and won't boot windows. this is all made worse by the fact that his internal optical drive is shot and he's been using a usb drive, which won't run unless you're in windows.
i've tried booting off my usb jump drive with no luck and my only other option is to boot off the nic, which i've never done before.
is it even possible to use another computer and a crossover cable to boot a pc? or does anyone have some advice on what i should do?

[glc]

You are now at the point where you have to get the internal optical drive working and get a fresh start. And do yourself a favor and don't put Norton on anything.

[quinnTE]

what antivirus program would you suggest?

[glc]

AVG Free.