Voice recording on a PC?

A friend of my girlfriend was round at our place last night and was saying that she wants to create a voice recording to send to her husband - it's their 5th wedding anniversary in a couple of weeks and he's been sent to Kazhakstan to work on the construction of a new oil platform for six months. Basically she wants to record a voice message that she can then burn onto CD (or possibly email, but he doesn't get much chance to check his personal emails) and post it to him so that he can listen to it on his CD player (not computer - therefore preferably audio file, not MP3). She also said she'd like to put her voice over music, but I said that may be a bit too ambitious. She asked me if I could help her, but after looking at various computer programmes, I'm stumped.

Does anyone know how this can be done - I have a PC, a microphone and various pieces of software (windows media player, real player, MSN messenger, etc) that can handle audio, but can't find a way for her to do it. If the software I have isn't suitable, is there any free software that can be downloaded for this purpose?

Thanks in advance...