System Stability (Crashing, and the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD))

My mother runs Windows '95. Sometimes when she boots up, the screen goes black 
and mangles the icons, and then freezes up. Why is this? We suspect it has 
something to do with the Video Driver and the driver for her Zip-Drive, since 
this only happens when the video is set higher than 8bpp, and her computer 
detects her Zip-Drive. We aren't sure. Can we fix it? No. Will Microsoft help 
us? Why would they, they didn't write the drivers... Also, sometimes the 
machine crashes in Photoshop. Sometimes netscape gets an exception ("Illegal 
Operation", like that hex info will help us a lot). Sometimes you can't click 
and drag the icons on the desktop, and just need to reboot. In the meantime, 
Linux runs beautifully on the same machine. Video, Zip-drive, networking, 
printing, you name it...

In my computer lab at school, we have machines running Solaris and Windows NT. 
The NT machines need to be rebooted after a few days because they're using too 
much memory. Using memory doing what? We don't know, but something leaks 
memory. After a few days they're using 128MB of memory, and after seven days 
they're using up to 300MB of memory, and exhausting swap space. My linux box 
also has 300MB of virtual memory (64MB physical, two drives with 128MB swap on 
each one) but I rarely use it. After two weeks I might be using up to 20MB of 
RAM. Well, I'm always using all of my physical ram to cache files, and load 
libraries, but I'm probably only really *using* 12-16MB of RAM for the running 
processes. Maybe I can use swap if I use the GIMP to render a giant spinning 
globe of the earth (worked fine, but I had to scale it down from 1000x1000 :) 
or if I load 100 copies of xv or something. But generally I don't have to worry 
about swap, and I never have to worry about my computer crashing or leaking 
memory.