HT203176 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?

If this started happening without your having made any changes and without a warning of low disk space, then it's likely that the boot drive is failing, or that there's some other hardware fault. Back up all data immediately, then run the Apple Hardware Test or Apple Diagnostics.
Even if the test is negative, you should make a "Genius" appointment at an Apple Store to have the machine tested more thoroughly.

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