Acer Aspire 7741Z factory restore fail -- Please Help

Hi all, new to the forum. Having some problems with my Acer Aspire 7741Z.

Trying to restore it to factory settings. Everything has gone smoothly all up until the first fresh boot. I've gotten to the Windows screen "System setting up for first boot" and what not. It loads fine. Now I'm to the Software Installation window; haven't actually logged in, Acer performs this on its own. It shows there is 21 things to be installed. I get to 10/21 and then sit for hours..I've shutdown and tried to log on again, but it jumps back to the same state. Sometimes it freezes at this point, other times it doesn't because the 'status' bar still shows to be working. Either way, I can't get passed this.

I am able to press Windows key and see the taskbar for a few seconds then it disappears again. I am also able to press ctrl-alt-del, bring up screen, click start task manager, see it for a second then boom, back to trouble.

I can now NOT enter Safe Mode; says Windows cannot continue restoring or loading from Safe Mode, restart and finish not in Safe Mode.

I do NOT have the recovery disk.

I can get my hands on a new copy of Windows - should I just go this route and reinstall fresh from disk?

ANY help would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks.

 

It might be the easiest thing to do- fresh install.