Sony Viao, XP and my woes

Karen's laptop antivirus wasn't running and it was acting wierd. Corruption or virus or spyware or a bit of all three maybe. After uninstalling Mcafee (ugh) I installed a free version of bit defender and seemed to clear everything up except some graphic anomalies that I attributed to a corrupt video driver. IE started shutting down so I ran Spybot and it found a bunch of spyware so I let Spybot S&D remove them. It took too long and eventually files started going missing. On reboot windows is missing hall.dll and wont' start. Last known good config, safe mode ain't working. I don't recall the password for admin(never set) so I can't get in through recovery. I booted knoppix linux CD and was able to access the drive so I could technically replace files but it would be a very long and tedious process to trial and error until it came up and even then it's still got potential spyware/virus issues. I want to copy 5 gigs or so worth of stuff off the damn thing but the CD-DVD burner apps won't spit the knoppix CD out so I can burn a DVD. My other solution is that I have a utility that should reset the admin password on her XP laptop and then I should be able to get into recovery and reinstall stuff over the existing OS in order to boot and clean and restore from a previous config. Sony's recovery DVD wipes out everything and gives you a factory fresh image. Whoopdee f'in doo. No data recovery tools. Bite me Sony. I am most likely gonna hook my ext. usb HD to the laptop and backup files that way. What a pain in the arse.