Can't login, infinite blue screen loop

I am trying to help my boss, whose daughters MBP is stuck in an infinite loop when trying to boot into OSX (it's a dualboot with Windows 7).
The machine is running 10.6.2 with Boot Camp 3.2.
When I boot it normally, I get to the blue loading screen, where it flashes between to different blue screens in an infinite loop.
Booting into verbose mode doesn't show any obvious errors in the boot messages, and then gets to an infinite loop between a blue screen, and a black screen with a block cursor.
I am able to boot into single user mode, where I ran fsck -fy, but this turned up no errors.
I can boot into Windows fine, and there seems to be no hardware issues (ie Device Manager seems happy with no errors). To be extra sure, I ran CHKDSK, which reported no problems (and took a couple of hours to complete).
While in Windows I was able to view the HFS partition (not sure if Windows 7 can read HFS, or if a third party driver was installed).
As I don't have a recovery disk I haven't been able to verify the permissions, which I suspect could be a cause for the issue.
Does anyone have a suggestion or any insights?

How bout holding down the option key? 
Then select the drive in question.
Oh wait... You must have tried that.
Sounds like if you're able to see the HFS volume then at some point someone must have installed a utility to do so.
That said, is it possible that there are files that have been moved or misplaced?

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