Blurry Blue Screen of Death and ntfs.sys Missing

I've had to reformat an HP dv6000 laptop using its recovery partition, because it was infected with kind of virus. Everything was fine after the reformat, just had to remove all the bloatware and install updates and security software.

The operating system is Windows XP MCE, and SP3 installed fine, but after I installed the remaining updates not included in SP3, the system would boot, then a few seconds later would BSOD, only it was very blurry and hard to read, then the system would reboot and do the same thing over again. I could vaguely make out "ntfs.sys", which can sometimes be corrupt or missing, according to Microsoft (see link below).

I found this Microsoft Knowledge Base article and followed its instructions to no avail. After further searching, I found this forum thread. It sounded like a very similar problem, so I decided to run chkdsk /r to see if that helped. Perhaps the hard drive is damaged somehow, as it was making strange clicking noises earlier during the reformat. The chkdsk revealed nothing, which leads me to believe nothing can be done save reformatting yet again.

Before the problems started appearing, I had installed COMODO Firewall Pro and DriveSentry for firewall and anti-virus. Perhaps these programs had something to do with ntfs.sys being missing or corrupt. COMODO includes a "Defender" portion of its program that is very similar to DriveSentry's function of monitoring writes to the hard disk. After a short while I disabled Defender, as it was redundant in this case, but maybe two write-to-disk monitors running at the same time is not good for the file system.

This laptop does not belong to me, but the owner has had repeated issues with all of its hardware, so I get the feeling that it is just a lemon.

UPDATE: The laptop was sent away to the manufacturer to be examined, and they ended up replacing the hard drive, which solved the problem.