It actually sounds like she needs to make some adjustments to her browser. IE, Firefox, or both. I run Vista on one machine, XP Pro on the other, and can't for the life of me duplicate this error.
Have her check her security options for both browsers, and make sure there isn't something off there.
Also, with the database repair, there are times where any ONE of you may experience a page load difficulty at random. When THAT happens, I'm running a db utility after doing a lot of work to make sure the tables are all functioning as they should. Since your friend is indicating that the background color draws, it could very well be that she's had the misfortune of trying to connect exactly when I've been running the utility. This only takes about 5 minutes tho, so would not create a consistent draw problem.