Did you try the one I mentioned above - for that all you need is access to the profile files on the old drive?
-Carol Haynes
That seems to cost $28 which to save time and effort might be a bargain.
Then again, I'd be trying to exhaust all free methods before I got that far.......but I do have a lot of spare time
@techidave: If you can read the HDD, (Live CD, plug it in another computer), you can copy the registry files, (in C:\Windows\system32\config), to a flash drive or directory and then use the Load/Unload Hive feature of regedit to access the entries and try as Ath suggests above. You might need to copy the relevant NTUSER.DAT also, as Carols link suggests. Or you could just use Nirsoft'
RegFileExport to export the registry entries in NTUSER.DAT so you can import them into a new account as Ath suggests.
If it were me, I'd probably image the drive, (or OS partition), and then perform a Repair-in-place which would fix the non-booting problem and should restore access to OE to run the Nirsoft tool. That, for me, would be the simplest solution but it depends on how munged the system became before getting to the non-booting stage.