I'm not sure what the fix is; neither person who reported this posted again with an update, if they were able to get it displayed.
If your friend has the game set to auto-update, is 1.0.72 also displayed just as 'v'?
Have your friend make sure they don't have anti-aliasing forced in their video drivers. That can cause missing text characters, though I don't know if it might also effect the displayed version number (if so it is fairly rare compared to the number of people who have reported the issue in-game, though it may simply not have been noticed in the menu).
Also, get them to try verifying local files (I'm not sure if that will force an update, though). In the Steam library, right click on Divinity Original Sin and select Properties, switch to the Local Files tab and then click on the 'Verify Integrity of Game Cache...' button.
