Interactive Logon Process failed. (Windows Vista)

I am helping a friend of the family with a 2 month old Dell Inspirion 1505,
running the Vista operating system that was supplied with the new laptop. The
owner has applied updates when available and has had no other problems. I
have cut and pasted the verbiage from another post below, as it describes our
problem, but there were no responses since June, so I was hoping this post
might have a little more luck.

The previous post read:

I put my laptop away last night and took it out this morning to boot up and
got the same message:

"Interactive logon process initialization has failed. Please consult the
event log for more details."

I hit "okay", but the message comes right back, eternally. Stuck in a loop,
perhaps?
At this point I've tried Start up Repair, repair your computer, all Safe
Mode Start ups, system restore. Some things more than once. Nothing seems
to be working.

I have also tried the actions described above, successfully restoring to an
earlier checkpoint, but to no avail. We receive this message no matter what
method of start-up we attempt. (safe mode, safe mode with networking, safe
mode with command line.) The owner is a college student that will be heading
back to school soon, and I would rather not have to wipe and reinstall all of
his applications. Has anyone got any suggestions to help me avoid that
option?

Thanks,
--
CJL