IBook (mid-2005) keeps booting into Safe Boot

My nephew's old iBook 12" 1.33 (mid-2005) has a curious issue. Every time he restarts, the screen reports Safe Boot., even though he's holding down no keys to get there. I had him check in case any keys were stuck, especially the shift keys, of course, but all were functioning normally.
He's restarted several times, to no avail. He can't escape from Safe Boot.
Anyone know why this would be happening?
Thanks

Hi, Niel--
Unfortunately, I forgot to mention I had already tried that to no avail. The only thing that's worked so far is something he did by accident.
I told him to restart into single-user mode to use fsck on it. I said to hold down the S while restarting. He never let up on the key until the words, Booting into Max OS X appeared. Somehow, holding down the S through all that rebooted him normally. I still don't quite know how.
But he still can't reboot normally without going through single user mode even after that. I'm baffled.

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