Q: mountain lion, finder is unresponsive/times out

I am trying to help a friend who has a Mac Book Pro that is extremely slow (15 minutes to get to the sign in prompt) and completely unusable.

I am running into prblems trying to clean the system cache because the finder is unresponsiver to any attempts to open any folder or finder window. If I double click on a folder or the MacHD I will get the spinning beach ball for 1 to 2 minutes before it just gives up goes back to the regular arrow and the finder menu bar disapears until I click on the desktop somewhere.

I have managed to use the spotlight feature to open disk utility to run that and it did find several errors to repair (took 3 hours), and yet still having the same issues. I used fsdk -fy feature but it did not find any errors from the CMD+S boot up. I tried opening the system preferences to see if maybe it was a startup item causing the issue but it continuosly crashes out (comes up, closes, gives unexpected closed popup).

It is a late 2011 MBPro, 4GB of Ram, 750GB HD (only 80GB used) and is in emaculate condition (no scratches, dents, or blemishes on the casing or screen).

I tried using the CMD+R to boot into the recovery disk to just wipe it and start over, but it comes up with one of those European do not enter signs (circle with a line through it) and I am unable to get safari to connect to the internet without crashing out. Since I cannot open any folder or disk I can't even connect a usb thumb drive or firewire drive to attempt to get some other utilities to work on it.

Her Apple Care plan expired two months ago and I am unable to get assistance from 1-800-My-Apple.

PRAM resets, and an SMC reset... No joy. Can someone else offer any sugestions?