Laptop's programs close randomly

My daughter who is away at college, told me today that her Tangent laptop is acting strange. She said programs she has open will just close themselves all by themselves without any input from her. She said it happens to many different programs and has happened randomly over the last few days. Once the whole laptop shut down on its own. She said she ran virus and spyware scans and nothing showed up. Any suggestions I could give her would be appreciated.

 

Sorry for being dense, but how would she check for malware? Is that different from running her antivirus program and Adaware?

 

Oops, never mind. She ran another virus scan today and found and deleted a trojan and said that seems to have solved her problem.