Boot problems with Windows Vista (details inside)?

Unfortunately she did not leave the recovery CD with me so I can't kick off a reset. I'd also prefer not to do it and have to reinstall a large number of applications (which I don't have the media for as well). My aunt lives about an hours drive away and won't be back until next weekend when she takes my cousin back to the start of the next college semester so I'm hoping to have this ready for her to pick up.

I'm thinking to mount the drive as a slave in my daughter's laptop, which also runs Vista 64 bit. The desktop I normally use is 32 bit. Maybe I could do a closer file comparison to see if some of the files aren't matching up on file size. Maybe some MD5 checks would work too. I was hoping someone could point to a nice utility though that would analyze beyond what I've already done. I am finding Windows recovery very annoying compared to other operating systems.

@Mahel - The point of the question was to avoid having to do a reinstall. I don't have the recovery media. Even if I wanted to use the recovery partition, I can't access it (can't get to Safe Mode or Recovery) so doing a reset isn't an option. I wasn't looking for a "cookie cutter" reinstall answer. I wouldn't have had to ask a question if I was doing a reinstall or a reset.

Given the age of the question has moved it sufficiently down the list, I'll put the question to vote and select No Best Answer as my choice. Neither response was insightful into resolving the problem unfortunately. The point of the question was to find a solution that didn't involve reinstalling (which I stated very early in the question). A reset isn't possible since I can't get to a recovery mode and I don't have the media readily available.