Hi,

I guess she could just run a RAM test in the meantime? Link is here:

http://www.memtest86.com/

Ignore the bits about payment, that's for the comprehensive CD with additional stuff, and the source code shipped to you Just download the free application.

Don't run more than one pass. If it is a RAM problem that crashes an AV then it will either pass first time or fail pretty quickly.

and listens to music that she uploads from her cd's (actually paid for cd's from best buy)
That could be the answer?............... a corrupted upload perhaps? and music files do tend to be quite large. Also, I don't think that music file formats are handled that well in AV products, as they are not a traditional attack vector.

I would assume that she has all her music in a single partition or folder(s). Try telling the AV to ignore that partition or folder, and see if that makes a difference.

Also, get her to go into the BIOS and Windows and turn off all power saving options (yes I know that it is a laptop). There might be some problem with the system thinking that the virus scan is inactivity (no user input) and it tries to hibernate or whatever.

Basically, this behaviour is very unusual so I am scratching around the strange occurrences that I have encountered in the past.