Inconvenient placement, zooming, and shutting down

Both my instructor and I have noticed that when dropping an object into the scene, no matter where it is dropped, it is placed in the center; Alice then zooms into it and zooms out. This is very inconvenient because the object sometimes gets placed below various other ones and it can be hard to get at.

In addition, Alice randomly shuts itself down without warning. I hadn't put too much stress on the program -- I was in the second world since opening the program (I'd closed the other one) and only had four objects in it and no script.

I've been using Alice 2.2 for the class. I was using 2.0 previously for a week or so and hadn't had these problems, but I'm not entirely sure if this is a coincidence or not.

These problems don't happen on the school computers; only on our personal computers, it seems.

Does anybody know what the issue might be, and perhaps how to fix it?