McAfee has repeatedly popped up with notices saying that the file '****.exe is infected by the New Win32 virus and cannot be cleaned'. After I got rid of this it popped up with the same notice but about another exe, and so on… It was going through all my programmes. I couldn’t open pretty much all of my programmes, but if I did, it came up with a notice saying 'Windows cannot access the specifie device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to acess the item.'
I restarted, to reboot in safe mode to run an online scanner, but the machine has now frozen during reboot.
Any suggestions, short of reformatting?

"Any suggestions, short of reformatting?"

You'll never know if it has other hidden problems.
"Nuking and paving" is so easy that I don't clean questionable computers. Blow it away and start fresh.

Once again where FAT32 could have been useful.

Sounds like its time to re-install windows. A re-format is not necessary, a fresh install of windows will prevent any viruses from launching and then once you have installed winblows, you can run a virus scanner to get rid of all the infected files.

Core 2 Duo 1.86

tap f8 on reboot and go into safe mode with networking (I presume you are on high speed internet)
Then
what I would do is D/L avast free to your desktop, install it and let it do a bootscan on reboot and move EVERYTHING it finds to the chest.

If your problem has been fixed, then I would unload McFattee (resource hog) and if you need a good free Firewall Comodo Pro is really good, Avast and Comodo work well together.

Some HELP in posting on Cnet plus free progs and instructions Glad to Help!