It's taken care of. I swapped the HDD, reformatted and did a clean install from my own DVD (I had one license instance left) and it's now working quite well again.  I had already replaced the palmrest/touchpad assembly as I had noted earlier, etc. because of a damaged left-click button; while the HDD tested OK via Dell's thorough test and Win 7 chkdsk, one of the professional data recovery programs I use found problems with it. It appears this was a problem caused by an Avast and/or Win 7 update from earlier in the month. If the church secretary had been doing her updating as she is supposed to, the aswRvrt.sys issue probably would not have surfaced and been taken care of via normal updating...one more reason to get folks to do their updating when it should be done and not put it off. Thank you for your attention.
I've read a huge number of posts on this subject, but have not had success. I've been doing this sort of thing for a lot of years...very frustrated right now. This machine is my church's office computer. Someone slammed the left-click touchpad key and jammed it a couple of weeks ago, and therefore the machine would then only beep repeatedly on startup and not finish booting because of the continuous key contact. I ordered a new palmrest/touchpad assembly, and in the process did a data recovery on the HDD to save the important stuff. HDD dx at that time showed no problems, and the recovery partition was there (btw...the N5110 is the biggest PITA I"ve ever had for getting to the HDD). Anyway...the new palmrest assy came in this morning; I replaced it, and while operation appeared normal in terms of keyboard, touchpad, etc. and the machine progressed (without the beeps) toward boot, the machine will still not finish a boot, nor will it reload from the recovery partition. The OS is Win 7 Home Premium. I've done the following: 1. Disconnected the power supply, removed the battery, and held the power button for 30+ seconds to clear the BIOS. 2. Reset the BIOS to default. 3. Ran the Dell diagnostics, which took a while but came back clean on all counts. 4. Tried "Repair your computer" from F8; it shows the "Loading Windows files" progress bar, then briefly the green Windows progress bar, then the screen goes black and stays that way...forever. 5. Tried booting Safe Mode; shows the loading process, but hangs before actually booting. 6. Tried booting normally; shows "Starting Windows" and then hangs at the splash screen. 7. I had one license instance left on my personal Win 7 Ultimate Full disk, and tried a clean install from booting from the DVD; basically the same behavior as in #4. 8. Tried Ctrl/F11 and got nothing. I could use some input here. Don't know what to try next, or if this is beating the proverbial dead horse.
Unable to reinstall Win 7 from recovery partition on Inspiron N5110