So, after being out of town for the weekend I was finally able to apply some of the great advice I got from everyone. It was a little rocky in spots. We had almost no internet so the videos were out of reach and it was my first time actually taking apart a laptop. In the end it got cleaned out. There were no visible signs of debris or damage other than a severely clogged exhaust. Unfortunately it didn't solve the issue...

More (slightly) educated guessing lead to me eventually removing the HDD and booting from my USB. The thing WORKED! A quick trip out to Memory Express confirmed my one suspicion that the HDD had just decided to stop and the computer was trying to get a response from it forever rather than just throwing and error. I like programming and even a cryptic error is better than a blinking cursor. That sucks for data recovery, but the owner had a backup and will be investigating a professional company to fix and recover the drive if need be. We got the replacement drive and a few other things and went to work on that.

About the only major hiccup was the lack of any wifi after the Windows reinstall. I had fixed a similar problem over a year ago and now firmly stand by the point that having a physical switch on the laptop controlling the internet is a completely stupid idea because it is so easy to turn off. Unfortunately that took almost 2 hours to find (mixed in with figuring out why another laptop was getting privacy messages on every browser), made me feel like an idiot and I called it a day for fixing stuff.

In closing: A sincere Thank You to every one who helped. It was very educational and interesting to say the least. Even if I didn't use all the advice, I'll be keeping it close if something like this happens again.

Thank you all,
~CW