computers can't do anything on their own, so something has to be telling these applications to open.

Maybe a batch program, script, scheduled task....

Which ones are opening and how often do they do it?

im not sure, im troubleshooting someone elses computer.  i believe it is solitaire, but im not exactly sure what theyre doing to make this happen.  thanks for your help though, i appreciate it.

there is a remote chance of it being some sort of wild virus, so you might as well try running a virus scan

It could be a virus, a full system scan with recent virus definitions installed is always a good start.

Solitaire is S O L.exe (without the spaces) located in the C:\Winnt\System32\ folder on most systems. If you rename the file to something like S O L.old (without the spaces)  whatever tries to autoexecute it will generate an error and hopefully some kind of onscreen warning, which may help you isolate what's doing this.

Sorry for the confusing nature of the post but apparently S O L is considered profanity by some genius at Dell:

Message Body: Message body contains invalid content. Please do not use profanity in your post. Profanity is not tolerated on these boards. (Word: S O L)