Macbook Pro boots to a blank blue desktop

I am trying to help out a friend, she has a Macbook Pro that is a few months out of warranty. The machine turns on fine and you see the normal grey Apple logo/screen and it starts to load. After a few minutes of that it will switch to a light blue screen with nothing else. Eventually I will get a black cursor that will come up that I can move around but do nothing with. She cannot find her OS discs so I am probably screwed.
-I tried booting into safe mode by holding shift while turning it on, but nothing changed.
-I tried holding C down while booting, but the same
Does anybody have any tips? Is there anything I can do without having the original CDs? Is there a way to obtain the original CDs without having to pay for them? Any help is greatly appriciated.

Same here, only on the 20" iMac. Computer goes to black screen with constant power light, not pulsating as when on standby. Switch off pressing power button for 5 seconds. On restarting, loads OS X, then freezes on blue screen (why are they always BLUE). Restart using external firewire drive. Run Disk Utility. All sorts of problems, from missing directories to something about invalid nodes, invalid directory item counts. Finally, a message "could not be repaired after 3 attempts".
Previously, I had to do an archive and repair as 4 of my .prefpane files had replaced themselves with PPC version - I have no idea why this happened. The last major thing I did was to try and get parallels to network with my PC in order to transfer files...but that's probably for a completely different thread.
Please help. My mac is dead and my 90-day phone support has just expired.

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