Is is really in safe mode Larry, or is the screen resolution merely at 640x480x8?

In safe mode, it should say "Safe Mode" in the corners of the screen.

If she does a cold reboot of the laptop and it still comes up in Safe Mode, there might be a problem in the registry. There is a setting in the registry (in 95/98/Me) "BootSafe" -- '0' means 'normal mode' and '1' means 'safe mode'.

This can also be set in MSDOS.SYS, by adding a line of "BootSafe=x" where 'x' is 0 or 1.

If this is a WinNT-based Windows (Win2K, WinXP), there is a line in the "boot.ini" file that contains the string "safeboot:minimal" on the operating system line.