Shoutbox

Firstly, can she execute things with the keyboard? alt+ctrl+delete? maybe check the processes to see what's going on (might be best if you do that). Assuming that she can't do things like bring up the start menu, alt+ctrl+delete or cycle through the windows then the rest of this post applies....

To me it sounds as though the computer froze and continues to freeze because of IE.  The problem being caused when booting might be from some application trying to access the internet through the IE stuff (like how we use the activeX object in scripts).  I think you should look at checking for any malicious software that may cause this problem and also to try reinstalling IE to see if that fixes it (the latter is the easiest and quickest so go for that first).