Friend's desktop was so fried from Kazaa and Limewire, that he couldn't even open a Windows explorer window. Ended up opening Notepad and copying all of his files to a thumbdrive using the file open dialog box before reformatting.
This kind of hacky dumb workaround is exactly what I wanted to read when I posted this thread, haha. It's kind of genius but also I'm horrified to imagine how things got to that point.