It is a mix of chipset and Vista. There are system board timing problems that run into conflicts, sort of a collective failure across the game design, graphic drivers and Microsoft. When the game requires extensive calculations, accessing memory, graphics memory, etc., Vista runs into problems, loses it and in most cases can recover even though sometimes it takes up to 10 minutes to recover. There are tons of similar complaints in this forum and this issue needs to be better organized. I think if everyone states their specs in either case if they have problems or not, it will be easier to decide whether you are out of luck and have to wait for someone to come up with a fix or go out and buy a new motherboard that doesn't have this issue. I suspect that for AMD, anything below the newer motherboards are having problems, but it'd be good to get a consensus.
Afreeti, what type of motherboard are you running since SOASE is running fine for you?
I have trouble on my AM2 590 SLI AMD board running Ultimate 64 bit, 2.4 GHZ 4600+ X2, 4 GB RAM, 2 x 7600 GT 256 RAM: I get BSOD, freeze but recovery, graphic driver has stoppped responding error, all pointing to nvlddmkm.sys driver. There is no solution for my specs so far.
If you have less than 2 GB of RAM, you will probably run into issues too. 10 mins into a game, SOASE has taken up over 1.5 GB of memory on my PC, so if you aren't getting the graphic driver has stopped responding error, then it could be something else.
See the "Video Driver Issue causing hangs and bluescreen" for lots of info on the progress.