My girlfriend just bought a laptop yesterday, we removed most of the crap that came pre-installed (Asus)..

But when Steam is running and she's surfing with Internet Explorer, both programs crash at the same time

I've updated DirectX, it's born with .NET 4 so that doesn't need to be updated (can't find any links so I assume it's up to date, don't know how to tell), updated Flash - nothing helps.

Steam doesn't crash by it's own, but IE makes it crash..

Windows Update says there's no more updates to install (installed over 50).. It's Win7 SP1 64bit.

I've tried to look into the Event Viewer, but there's no common denominator as far as I can see (different .dlls in crash log)..

What could be the problem here?
Would it help to remove all Asus-crap-ware thingies? It's not my laptop, so I'm very careful with what I'm doing on her machine, and I don't know what most of the tools are used for.. Don't want to break anything so she gets mad at me - although I would remove it all in a heartbeat if it was my own, risks or no risks ^^

If anyone could provide links to all essential updates that might need to be installed, we would be very grateful!