Well, I managed to maneuver my way around this problem. Since it
seems to have stumped everyone here (except Billy, who apparently
knows exactly what's going on but isn't sharing information or
advice), I'm posting my super kludgey "solution".
First, using recovery console, I deleted the offending file. I didn't
expect to be able to boot this way, but I thought I might be able to
force some other kind of error. Instead, during the next boot the
file was restored, loaded, and caused the same stop 0xD4.
Next, I tried replacing the file with a different driver. I copied
null.sys to av5flt.sys. This was basically a "Hail Mary" play, but to
my surprise, it sort of worked. I was able to boot into XP (not even
safe mode, right into the fully configured system), and was able to
copy all of the essential files to a second hard drive that was
installed on the system. Oddly enough, Panda was happily up and
running, apparently unaware that anything was amiss, other than it's
virus defs being out of date.
There were a number of other errors, including several popups telling
me that Windows had recovered from a severe error (gee, thanks,
Windows!), and prompting me to send a report to Microsoft. I also got
repeated attempts by Windows Installer to install something that it
could not find. My brother-in-law was sitting beside me at the time,
and casually told me that this happens all the time, all I had to do
was open task manager and kill everything on the screen. Fortunately,
he did recognize that something wasn't quite right about all this, and
had already resigned himself to reinstalling XP on the machine. So
having gotten far enough to copy off their important files, my job was
done.
So anyway, I don't know how good an idea this was, or what the long
term effects might have been. But if you ever find yourself in a
similar situation, in which some third party driver is stopping
Windows before you can even log in and do anything, and this happens
even in safe mode, then you might try doing what I did. Good luck.
>> Stay informed about: Panda on XP Problem 
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