When my wife plays Spider solitaire, the computer freezes up on here windows vista home edition and nothing works, so we have to shut the computer down and restart it again.
This is a common problem with Spider Solitaire in Vista which MS haven't addressed. General opinion is that updating to the latest graphics card driver from the computer manufacturer's website helps, but doesn't solve it.
You could try doing a search for a free version of the game and install that. This is just one I found.