The first thing I'd suggested to him was to delete his CD player and allow the system to reinstall it; in fact this worked. Thanks for the help, though - very interesting.

Incidentally, I once bought a computer off a young lad who had six fans in it, because he had it overclocked to hell out of it. He told me that he'd once lit a cigarette off one of the huge (physically) hard drives. It never worked awfully well, for some reason.