If it's only crashing when idle, then it sounds like it's going to sleep on you. IOW, your power options are set to "sleep" after a period of inactivity (this is by default), and for some reason this is causing a crash.
Go into control panel-Power options, and change your profile to High Performance. This basically will disable the sleep/hibernate settings.
Another possibility is some task that normally runs when your system is idle (defragging, virus scanning, etc) is taking off and causing the crash.
If the power setting change doesn't work, post back. Also, it would help if you listed your basic system specs.