Vista is basically Microsoft's attempt to reign in the deployment nightmare known as Windows (personally I'd love to see the Registry just go away). Blue screen errors are the result of errors in driver code. In order to do all the things that thirdparty developers for Windows do they make liberal use of Window's driver API. For instance - if you go into device manager and turn on virtual drivers you'll see that your anti-virus has several loaded to allow it to intercept file accesses before Explorer does. Chances are one of your drivers was straight ported from XP - seemed to work out Ok and was distributed as is without having memory usage validated. You can download Windows debugger tools and open the mini-dump that Windows does (one of the few things I like about Windows) and it'll parse the last stack trace to see what driver (.sys) was executing at the time of the crash. From there you can see if there's something you need to update or at least email the dump to the provider. I've found when I upgraded to Vista all my crashes were coming from my anti-virus (BitDefender) - mostly because I edited the installer for BitDefender to let me deploy it on Vista.

Third party components not being updated in a timely manner for Vista isn't really Microsoft's fault. The only problem I have with Microsoft and Vista (and bear in mind I don't do much driver level programming - so it could be that MS went and introduced bugs into that layer that I'm not aware of) is that Microsoft in general tries to do too much. It tries to optimize things for you (example - prefetching & IO prioritization) and it tries to secure software for you (denying writes outside of a limited number of locations, a bizarre privilege system, UAP). Contrasted with Linux, Windows is actually incredibly complicated - especially when you have a system where thirdparty developers have taken certain liberties that they shouldn't have taken (example - WindowsBlinds hacking the lower level GDI libraries - causing otherwise solid apps to look buggy because memory access violations start popping up where they wouldn't using standard GDI libraries). The only thing that complicated on Linux is CORBA but that's mostly abstracted enough that you don't need to deal with it.

All these problems will be sorted out though eventually I imagine but what I'd really like to see is a 1:1 port of DirectX to Linux so that developers could write games cross-platform. That and Exchange support would eliminate my need for Windows entirely.