Red flag already…
Another red flag totally relatable to the first…
Is he running something idiotic such as mycoffee [Not typing their name here lol] or something? could be his system [assuming he is the admin user] maybe have a corruption in the user rights access?
Is he trying to run it on an external drive?
I could go on, but the fact remains, this is evidently something to do with the laptop than anything else…
Out of curiosity, can he select x64 compile instead of x86? I mean, has he tried both?
Another thing that springs to mind… what is the file properties for the images? copy if newer or?
Also, can he compile a fresh template on that laptop?