Really though, as long as you can get through the install, upgrade, get it how he likes, you can always just do a freeze and not upgrade it once he has all the programs on there that he wants. I'm guess he'll just want openoffice, firefox, and some sort of email manager. Once XGL or AIGLX...
WORD OF WARNING, These cards have an on chip delay of atleast one second, I have hooked my xbox in and it was unplayable with the delay. The delay is built in to help with the pvr aspect of the card. I was unable to find a way to disable it.
Did you happen to install BF2 demo recently and update to that driver? I did and i had the exact same problem with Guild Wars. Grab the latest driver from nVidia ( I have a 6600GT but PCI-E) It fixed it for me.