Hi Julia
As already written, your report is rather vague. So we can only make a wild guess.
If I recall correctly your students used MSWindows and had a problem which was solved in a testbuild. If this is correct some of them had a relative new version from a new build generation.
Again which version is the "latest" in your opinion, we can only guess. If you downloaded this latest version from sourceforge that could be the version of september 2016.
This is older and from another build generation as the testbuilds you can find on sourceforge.
This should still be no probem IF your students uninstalled the testbuild before installing the build. However if your students installed an older version on top of a newer testbuild, from another build generation, the PSPP version might crash.