Q: Some apps crash out when I close their window and switch to the Finder

Yes on both points.  That is how it's supposed to work, Command Q or selecting Quit.  Or if in a one window app such as System Preferences etc...

I belive you're onto something though.  I tried it in Text Edit again.  This time, I saved out a text file with random text.  Then I command tabbed to the Finder AFTER closing the document window, Text Edit didn't crash .  However, Pages is still crashing, even with saving out a file of random text and command tabbing ot the Finder.

Did some more troubleshooting still.  I opened up Activity Monitor and repeated things.  Got Pages to crash out, BUT, it's still showing as a running app with 3 threads in Activity Monitor, not showing up in the dock, nor the command tab menu(when you switch apps and so forth).  And as I typed this paragraph Pages finally vanished from Activity Monitor.  Repeated and it went to 5 threads, now 4 threads, then 3 , then 4, now 3, it's at exactly 1.93 perecent of CPU time being used.  It's oddly staying open this time. 

Could this be an issue with the dock not displaying things correctly?  Despite Activity monitor showing Pages running, it's not being displayed in the dock at all, much like when it would crash out but with no crash dialog box.  Text Edit has been running still throughout all this, it's showing up in the dock.

Something I should clarify, the app's icon will also vanish from the dock when it crashes.  The most puzzling thing about this, there is no crash dialog box with the option to send a crash report.

Also, I should mention.  It's not showing up in the command tab menu either, when it's not showing up in the dock.

Yep it's doing it in the new user too.  Strangely, Pages is shown in the Dock.  TextEdit still has the same behavoir too.  Looks like I'm reinstalling.  Going to backup stuff and then reinstall.

Sorry for taking so long to reply.  It's still doing it.  I'm kind of wondering if something like a preferences file is corrupted, however, I have to do a total system reload to begin with to eliminate any potential corrupt data on the windows 7 install.

Back story.  When I first got this thing it was running super ridiculously hot.  It's the first laptop I've ever owned however so I had nothign to use for reference.  After about two months of it getting brutally hot, it did a BSOD in the windows 7 install I did via bootcamp.  It never turned back on.  Took it to the Apple store in Novi MI and they stated it somehow ran so brutally hot the CPU did a solder reflow and the whole motherboard shorted out.  Even worse though, I had gotten this hot before rendering stuff in Maya and Vue.  I had done burn in tests when I first received the system, it had passed, or so I thought.  They couldn't even get the system to turn on at the Apple Store.

The tech at the apple store told me that one of the heat sink pins on the CPU just plan broke off and another wasn't attached correctly.  Essentially the system kept overheating as I was consisently completely maxxing out the system doing CGI test renders for my junior animated short film.  The cooling system was never fully connected at the factory according to the Apple Tech.  I don't know how literate everyone reading this is on computer engineering but, when you overheat an IC, whether it's an ASIC or CPU, they dont' immediately crash, they corrupt data.  To further complicate the mess and increase teh chances of data corruption, with the 4th gen Intel i series CPUs (which the MBP uses), they moved the northbridge directly into the CPU die.  So if teh CPU is overheating, the chances of data corruption inadvertantly go up even higher.  I'm suspecting that happened in the first few days of owning the system but that it was minor at that point.  It can take months for the effects of corrupted data to propagate out and be visible to the user.

I would assume that they did a diagnostic test on the SSD when it was in for service, to ensure the SSD didn't overheat.  The tech did state that if the drive failed the diagnostics, they would have ot replace the drive and henceforth all my data would be gone.  Not really a way around it.

Currently under the windows 7 install with Maya and Vue, later iterations of the scene file, from Maya, for my animated short film, have a reproduceable glitch involving a gamma shift and camera selection.  Part of the scene files seem to be corrupt and were saved that way.

Reloading the OS from the recovery partition did not fix the original problem I've been having that I initially asked for help with.  I'm considering wiping out the recovery partition in addition to reinstalling windows 7 and OS X again, it would be the only way to completely eliminate the possibility of any corrupted data floating around on either partition.  I don't have a way of knowing if corrupted data was written to the SSD beyond the corrupted Maya scene files.  The only way I can be sure that it's 'contained' or eliminated, is if I completely wipe the drive and start from scratch.  Now would be a great time rather than in the middle of working on my senior thesis for my BFA degree.

I'm wondering if you could point me to documentation showing how to wipe out all the partitions, including the recovery one.  My understanding is that there is a way to do a 'net boot' or 'net recovery' over a broadband connection using Apples servers.  The idea of doing a Live boot from a Ubuntu distro to run fsck is appealing but it would be pointless.  The file system shoul be fine, it's the data the file system points to that I suspect is corrupted at somepoint.  Unless you recommend otherwise and or formatting.

The overheating also corrupted my journal but there is no way to recover it, I overwrote the earlier file(it looks like uncompiled C++ and jibberished text) when I saved it after completing an entry.  This was many months ago.  Though the idea of attempting a restore with Ubuntu Remix or other recovery Linux distros is appealing I'm doubtful I'd get far, though it's an SSD not a traditional harddrive and they don't work the same.

Back to the main point though, I suspect the overheating corrupted a prefs file which is causing the glitch I'm seeing, and reloading the OS did not fix it.