I have a friend with a low mileage 98 neon. long story short his girl stole it and went cross country with a leaking oil filter. So the motor locked up from having no oil. So the insurance will likely pay for a rebuild or hopefully :wary a whole new engine. So my question is can I rebuild an oil starved block that locked up? This would be a great way to cheaply start on a rebuild and end up with no downtime.

anybody have an opinion?

all depends on what happened, sometimes it will be fine, others it wont, the only way to know for sure is to take it apart and check out the condition