That happened to me with 7.04. Found HAL corrupted.
Had to reinstall. That did the trick. Just a thought.

In simple terms the Hardware Abstraction Layer controls many devices in Ubuntu
and
allows you to read and write to these devices. If your friend inadvertantly
downloaded an
upgrade to the HAL and it failed as mine did than you won't have any control
over your
apps, network, and files. He may not be able to backup his files either. Not
knowing
anything about your friend's machine it's far easier to reinstall and watch out
for HAL
upgrades.

I just tried the same thing with almost the same results. Go and buy a
USB kit to change the drive to a external USB drive and it will work fine.
If you can get it to work. let me know the secret.

He thought that his drive was going to crash so he started deleting
crap off the drive and after he got rid of about 5gb worth of picts he
said things literally cleared up on the spot.

Sounds crazy to me but - when you have a person who is not a computer
person - if something fixes itself then you are just happy your
computer works. Why it is working - I dont know but Im waiting for
another text saying its totally crashed.