It's a launch wii with bootmii as boot2, he's just failing to get it to work; the files don't seem to work. And, yes, he upgraded to 4.x and down to 3.2 again to change his shop channel region to ntsc for rock band 2.
It'll probably just be his files are messed up, I'm going to his house tomorrow to see what I can do.
Assuming I get bootmii to work, what do I need to do? Reinstall ios50?