I really do appreciate just the fact that you're trying to help at all and making these suggestions. And actually, believe it or not, I'm actually in an odd way happy to hear that someone else is having this same issue because odd things tend to happen to just me alone and I end up taking it personally after a while, LoL :P
Do you know if your friend tried re-installing the operating system? Some times that has a way of wiping the 'slate clean' on an otherwise perfectly fine computer where files have somehow managed to become congested despite doing regular disk cleanups and defrags. I just need to wait for the right pay week when I can replace my OS and do the reinstall. I'll keep my fingers crossed that it fixes the problem and I'll let you know here if it did the trick.... Or if your friend beats me to the reinstall, please let us know what the results are