Greetings, can your wife's iPad get to the Internet via safari? Can it get to the app store? Reply back with a little more information and maybe we can help sort this out.
Does it have too many apps running in the background? You can check this by double clicking the home button. The screen will appear to slide up and reveal the running apps, except for the app you are currently using, if any. You can slide the list of apps to the left to reveal more, if there are more. Sometimes having too many apps in this are causes my iPad to not be able to operate correctly. One time it was not getting mail updates. Another time I could not search in the App Store, even the spinner would stop but no results would show. Clearing out the running apps took care of the problem.
Good luck.
Sent from my iPad using iPF - Peace