After five hours of wrangling, both last night (until 3am) and this morning, I've finally stopped my computer from BSOD'ing.
I only noticed after I ran some Windows Update stuff - which didn't agree with Vista, apparently, and started it in a BSOD loop (crash, restart, crash, restart)
But I managed to glean enough information to make an educated guess that there was something wrong with the driver for the HDD - reinstalling it seemed to have worked (well, at first the whole pc wouldn't even get up to the Vista loading screen, citing "no hard disk" found, but it's found it now I guess)
So yeah. Windows is updated now. And not crashing. And I think it's not doing that random "stalling" thing anymore.
Good.

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Sideeffect; I've managed to destroy MediaDirect. Then again, considering I didn't even know it existed until today, it's really unimportant...all it does is let you run your PC without loading windows to play music and stuff....but..it just loads another OS so why would you bother? Just go into Windows instead...
but yeah. That partition is taking about...13gb and it's hidden. One day I'll reclaim it (that requires work though and frankly my laptop is running fine now and I still have like 160gb free...dont wanna screw it up again...)
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So yeah. Vista impressions? I say wait a couple more years. It's nice and pretty and stuff but lol that was a pain