I feel your pain.
I've been crash free for about 3 nights in a row. Usually when I crash to it's when I first load the game.
Vista is NOT good for this game. Not optimized for vista and nor are many games to say the least. I can play cod4 , crysis etc on max setting or high on crysis without even the slightest hiccup.
This game however does do alot of stuff as I can see. All of those things have to be pushed to their limits at times.
If I were you, I would ensure your power supply was running solid. Also, you'd be surprised how bad your home electric drops and peaks. A UPS , even a 450watter for about $79 can do wonders. It helped me on another system long ago as did swapping a power supply on yet another system.
Personally, I have other issues (vista and creative sound drivers)
After reading a sound card engineers blog about sound card drivers poorly written after years of hard work put into new sound card tech, it's come to my attention that sound cards and sound drivers are possibly up to 70% of the crashes out there! That's a HUGE number and the sound card industry should be totally ashamed. I'm learning more and more as this becomes an issue.
Personally, I think people overlook flaky motherboards too. It's always best to ensure the mobo is up to date iwth the bios AND that you also run a memory stress test like memtest86 (I believe it's called). Let it run for like 8 hours while your home. I never like stress testing computers while I'm away, I've had a power supply catch fire before, small and smelly but scared me as it was next to a garbage can
