Essexboy - I too am having trouble booting my notebook with the system hanging in Safe Mode when it tries to load aswrvrt.sys.
Tried booting from USB drive after running Rufus, but system hangs on the System Recovery Options screen when “repair your computer” is selected. During standard boot, system won’t load windows, it tries to go into “startup repair” mode but hangs with default windows wallpaper and mouse pointer only on screen. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

System: Sony Vaio VPCEB running Windows 7 Pro