>I'm going to run a scandisk and defrag on his machine and see what that turns up. Do you know of any utilities that can check for things like faulty RAM?

Unfortunately don't know a "reliable" one. I was having intermittent hangups few months ago. I changed every hardware piece one by one and faulty one was floppy drive (reinstalled others) ! Can you believe a floppy would cause it.
Cetin