Cannot login to my usual account after power outage

Question

Had two power outages last night; machine survived the first one, but after the second outage and restoration I cannot get in to my usual user account. What happens:
Grey apple screen, normal
Blue screen with progress bar indicating that OS X is loading... before the indicator fills all the way to the right, it exits to a blue screen [of death] with a mouse cursor (which works) and just stays there. It goes no further. Rebooting obviously does not fix it; I rebooted a dozen times trying to get beyond that.
What I've tried that hasn't fixed it:
Rebooting
Unplugging and replugging, both computer side and wall
Repairing both the disk and permissions--done, no effect
Safe booting and attempting to log into the account under a safe boot--it loads the wallpaper and hangs right there, no dock, no menu loaded
Removing the User/~ Preferences folder
I believe that what is causing the problem is some login startup item. However, since I cannot even log in in Safe mode, I can't start the System Preferences Accounts panel to remove login items.
Question: Is there another way to remove the login startup items? Removing the Preferences folder has not helped. I'm missing something. What is it?
I can log in to any other user account. I am currently in Root.

Answer 1

From the root account, open the Accounts pane of System Preferences and delete the login items for your normal account; an admin account should be able to do this for any account on the system, while non-admin accounts can only be used to change their own login items.
If removing the login items does not fix the issue, remove other parts of the home folder until you are able to log in to that account. If you've removed/renamed the entire home folder and aren't able to log in successfully, check that the permissions on the hard disk allow all accounts to read it; if you still can't successfully log in to that account, restore a previous version of the NetInfo database.
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