Hmmm... strange - I have VISTA, and I have never experienced that problem. In the matter of the fact, all this complain about VISTA - I don't understand, have never had any real problems with it - in some cases, it even works better than XP, especially when I try to play old games.
Anyways - it looks like that it need some repairs. You could try to go back to a state, before the crash happens. That often works for me, when I experience some register errors. The windows register array, I hate it. Even when I had XP, it was something easily getting angry over.
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.