Can not get to Login Screen. Possible User Account or .plist Corruption?

I was helping a client who is upgrading both her desktop and a laptop machine. She had already started the process and she had used the migration tool to move her user account from her old G4 to both her new Mac Pro and MacBook pro. So basically both new machines were now clones of the old G4 which was running Tiger.
Everything was going well and we were busy doing some other stuff when I suggested to her that she should set up a secondary user account on each machine. This is something I suggest to users, because I have seen user accounts get corrupted, and if that account is the ONLY account on the machine, you are not going to be able to do anything on that machine (easily). At least with teh other account, you can log in and see the drive, etc.
So she set up a new user and also enabled fast user switching and I was about to show her how the whole user switching works, but when we choose to log out of her current account, the Mac went to blue screen and just got hung up. After much waiting we had to force a hard shut down. Upon restart we see the Apple logo and then go to the blue screen, but we never reach the login screen.
I wrote this off as a fluke, but also told her that I am not to comfortable with that and decided to completely wipe the drive and do a fresh install of everything and not use the migration assistant. All is well with that machine now.
So we moved on to the Mac Book Pro and we repeated the same addition of a user and upon logout it did the exact same thing. So by now I am sure that something in the library form the old G4 must be corrupt, because both of these machines were basically clones of that one. So we are probably going to do the same thing to this one too, but I was wondering if I could learn something from this.
Assuming that some .plist is corrupted, ( probably the com.apple.loginwindow.plist) I was thinking I could access the drive through target mode, find that. plist and delete it. But then that made me think, if I were to delete it, what would the Mac do at startup if it sees no .plist of the login screen or user accounts?
Also, is there a way to alter the login options through single user mode. So for example I am quite sure that it is the .plist for the log-in options that is corrupted. So if I could change the login option to automatically log into her account, thus bypassing the login screen, I think we can bypass this issue for now.
Thanks.

First you don't delete the suspect .plist, you move or rename it. Deletion is down the road a piece
Second, when the system boots, it recreates any missing .plist files, presuming nothing else is wrong.
Many, including myself, have dragged the entire Preferences directory onto the desktop and rebooted without a problem.

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Can not get to Login Screen. Possible User Account or .plist Corruption?

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