Electrum and Lightning Network Issues with BTC

So, someone asked me for help moving some BTC from storage, and I thought it’d be on something like a Ledger. I get there, and they have it on a Sandisk with Electrum. They had some Sats (not on Lightning), so I sent those off to a Bitcoin address without any issues. I checked the channels tab and saw an X BTC balance in the lightning network. It said they could send X BTC but receive 0 BTC, and there were no channels set up. It prompted me to create the first channel. Not knowing much about lightning channels, I decided to hold off for a bit. I set up my own Electrum, tested it with my own funds, created a channel with a spending limit I was comfy with, did a submarine swap back from lightning, and sent it to my regular BTC address. Everything worked fine. Went back to help this person again. Their X BTC balance was still visible on the lightning network, ready to be sent. I clicked on "setup new channel" and entered an amount a bit lower than their balance (but still above the minimum needed), making sure to leave enough for fees. But then it threw an error saying "not enough funds" (even though there was still +X BTC). Electrum crashed on me. Reloaded it and tried again, but the same thing happened. They took the Sandisk over to a new laptop and downloaded Electrum from the official site. When they opened it, the balance showed 0. Previous transactions were there but no lightning balance and no channels. Plugging the Sandisk back into the original laptop had Electrum saying, "This version of Electrum is too old to open this wallet" and it needed an update. So now, the Sandisk connection to Electrum is working again, but the balance is still missing.

It requires on-chain funds to create a channel while the wallet only has lightning funds (despite not having any channel). This shouldn't happen unless it's caused by a bug. First thing to check if their Sandisk contains a static channel backup that can be restored to that wallet in "Channels tab->Wrench&Screwdriver Setting Icon->Import Channel Backup". The backup may be a QR Code or long string. Another is if the seed phrase is set to have "recoverable channels" (created in v4.1.0 with the setting ticked or later versions with it set by default); In that case, Electrum could automatically recover a static backup of the channel after restoring the seed phrase. If you're successful with either one of the two, you can use the "static channel" to request the remote node to force-close the channel. Right-click on the static channel and select "Request Force-close".