Hopefully I've posted this in the right section.

I have a friend (seriously I do, actually a few more than that too) who has problems with her pc.
She picked up a new hp pc from best buy several months ago. It runs Windows Vista Home Premium.
The pc runs fine as far as I can tell, but she has one problem that I can't seem to help her with. Just recently past month or so, she isn't able to download any files while browsing the internet using IE7. It also interferes with her downloading files that people email her to her gmail/yahoo email accounts, etc. Plus she also mentioned that it was causing problems with msn messenger or whatever client she uses for IM. She brought it to Best Buy to have Geek Squad look at it but they said that they couldn't look at it locally and that they would ship it to another location for them to look at it and it could take several weeks to fix which obviously she doesn't want because she likes using her pc daily.

She dropped it off for me to look at before she resorts to giving in to Geek Squad's request.

Vista runs, pretty quick too (2gb ram, decent sized sata hd, fast cpu, vid card, etc.).

- I've applied any & all remaining windows updates available for her pc.
- I've installed a few different spyware apps along with using windows defender and ran scans but the pc is pretty clean.
- Turned off the Windows Firewall, I like to run with it turned on but I wanted to rule it out as a problem so it's off for now.
- She also Norton Antivirus which is a part of a norton security suite installed on this machine, I went in and disabled as many of it's functions (real time protections, firewall, etc.) as I could to see if it the cause of her problems.
- reset ie7 to it's default settings (there's a button for that in internet options) just to see if she somehow selected a setting that would prevent her from downloading files

- I've pretty much run out of ideas at this point.

I have attempting downloading files from various different locations on the net and I can't save a file that I've downloaded, I can't run a file from the download location - nothing.
I can click on a link to download a file (ex. downloading grisoft's free antispyware software), the progress bar appears, the amount being downloaded and download speed appears, it gets to 99%, after which I see a quick message about it verifying the file and then nothing. The file is not in the location where I specified for the download (ex. the windows desktop, or specific folder that I selected).

If I click on a file and select Run instead of Save, it goes through the same process, the progress bar appears, the amount being downloaded and download speed appears, it gets to 99%, after which I see a quick message about it verifying the file and then nothing.

I've never seen this with Windows XP before and searching google hasn't turned up any decent leads into what's causing this problem. The machine is clean, no spyware, no viruses and appears to function properly in every other respect.

I'm thinking that there is some hidden setting in ie7 that is turned on and is causing this problem but for the life of me I can't find it. All firewalls on this pc have been turned off so I'm sure this isn't a firewall issue. She's running as the local admin on her machine, UAC is turned on and will be left on unless I'm told otherwise.

Any suggestions/ideas as to what may be causing this problem? Has anyone seen this before?
It's definitely weird, my main experience is with Windows XP and I've never seen this behavior on that platform so I'm a little lost here.

OK, I've ranted enough and you're all tired from reading this post. I'd appreciate any help if you know what may be causing this. Thanks in Advance!