Trying to boot into safe mode results in Blue Screen

I am trying to repair a laptop infected with some malware, but I can not complete the boot into safe mode.  I get the prompt to boot into safe mode and then it appears to load the drivers, but after that it immediately pops up a blue screen with these characters:

 

⌐  ?

 

This is all it does and pressing keys after this does nothing.

 

From various sources on the internet I have tried to fix this by finding the same laptop and exporting the Safemode and then running the resulting *.reg on the infected machine, but this did not work.

 

I have used HiJack, Malwarebytes, Symantec Antivirus, and a few other tools.  These scans come up with no infections, but I still can not get to safe mode.  I am assuming something is still lurking behind the scenes and I do not know how to fix it.

 

Can anyone help?