I still remember when Vista had just come out and I installed it on my computer. I was getting such annoying hangups and blue screens constantly.

Turns out it was my sound card, or at least it's drivers. It was some super cheap Crystal-based one. It would have some glitch during the permissions swap of the UAC environment, and when it went to play that ding it would break the system and require a hard power off. If I muted the computer before the UAC, it was fine.

Pulled the sound card and it ran fine.