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Thank you all for your posts. I'm grateful for your taking the time to help. I will attempt to answer each post below, the best I can.

Has he tried hooking up to the power cord? How old is the battery? It sounds more like a low power situation to me than a virus.

I'm starting to think it's more a power situation too. He said that when the cursor froze, the hard drive started making weird, loud noises, while it was trying to (apparently) connect to "jdnetwork" (I should have mentioned this is my FIRST post, of course - would have been helpful). However, my PC makes noises from time to time, but has never totally collapsed like this.

How old is the iBook? If it is old enough, the PRAM/NVRAM battery has died - and removing the main battery while that was discharged can cause the Power Manager to get confused. If that happens, the machine might not turn on. Flip the iBook over and tell me what the model number on the bottom is.

He received the iBook maybe 7 or 8 months ago. It's not that old. He does announcing for a high school baseball team, and uses the computer to play songs between innings, for plate appearances and so on. So the school actually owns the iBook; they're letting him use it. It's one of the cheaper iBook's, though. Not a lot of bells and whistles.

1. Try zapping the PRAM by holding down command-option PR when you try to start up.

2. Try booting off of the recovery DVD provided with the computer.

3. If he/she can access the RAM modules and/or Airport card on the computer, make sure they are seated firmly. This last one bedeviled my Dad’s powerbook for a week post soft drop until discovered.....

Thank you for these suggestions/recommendations. I'm going to try to do these later today when I see my friend, and the computer is in front of me.

This happened with my Mom's 2001 iBook. The battery would discharge in about 1/2 an hour. It would not even wake from sleep. However, I removed and replaced the battery (the same 6 year-old battery), plugged in the charger, and then powered up the iBook just fine with the charger plugged in. In fact, you can run an iBook on the charger alone without a battery even in the battery bay.

Good info. Thank you. I going to play around with the battery later, and see if maybe that's the culprit. It's not worth giving the iBook to Apple for 7 days, I think. He needs to use it this weekend and next week (if possible) so having it gone for a week or more would be last resort. I'm going to see if there's an Apple store up in Ann Arbor after I post this message, since that's only about a 60 or 70 minute drive from here.

'Green power light'? Are you sure this is an iBook? I own both a 2004 iBook and a new MacBook. There are no green lights on the machine other than the battery charge indicator lights (4 of them) on the bottom of the machine. There is also an amber/green ring light on the charger cord, but that's it. Something sounds fishy here.

He said at first that he thought the light was blue, but then said "no, no, no, it's green." He didn't have the computer with him at the time, so there was no way I could check. It's definitely an iBook. I'm not sure of the model, to be honest. I can find that out later today, and post back here with that info, unless we fix it by then. In any case, when this has all been resolved, I will post back to let everyone know, regardless.

Just curious but was he using a a standard account or admin account when he tried to log in?

Standard account. It's a computer he was issued by a high school, to use with his baseball announcing. It's a really simple iBook. In fact, even though the iBook is new (2006) the software is, in most cases, from 2001 or 2002.

Thanks again very much everyone! Will post more updates later.