Be Excellent To Each Other

So, I got home last night and my laptop was completely frozen, so I decided to turn it off and on again. I tried starting windows normally, but vista just got stuck in a constantly rebooting loop. I booted into the acer recovery console and ran chkdsk and the automatic repair program which eventually started to get me into vista, but not to the actual point where I had a desktop I could use.
I gave up and left it running overnight and I'm now logged into windows with a temporary profile and I'm trying to backup what I can from the c drive, but everything (to do with file access) is painstakingly slow.
I've only got recovery discs and I'm not too familiar with vista, so I'm not sure there's anything I can do other than completely wipe/recover my windows partition.

If anyone has any suggestions that doesn't involve me spending Sunday overseeing tediously slow filecopying then I'd be very grateful to hear it.

(Sorry I'm on my phone so I'm not even going to attempt to edit my post).
I seem to remember that when I was in the acer recovery console, file access was still perfectly normal, my only problem was that it didn't recognise my external hard drive so I could only back stuff up to usb sticks. Even so, I think I have a plan...

the hard drive could have died, causing the problem with your profile.

Well after watching an hour of tedious filecopying. I've rebooted into the recovery console where I can copy files off at the correct speed, so something's definitely gone wrong with my vista install, but it at least looks like I can recover anything. Anyone know a way to recover my profile without actually booting into vista?

Well, I've had a tedious day of backing up stuff (that should already have been backed up, I know) and have restored my laptop to factory settings. I've done a surface scan and there is apparently nothing wrong with the hard disk, so now I get to put everything back how it should be.
What a fun way to spend a sunday.

Heat is a laptops worst enemy. Have any of the fans jammed or failed? That's usually what causes crawling,well, there are numerous reasons for that but high on the list are bad ram, overheating CPU and as has been pointed out, HDD failure.

Have you let this virus near your laptop?