HELP!!

Heya.

For some reason (and I'm not quite sure why) I decided to go with Vista 64 bit for my new build, thinking that it would be the best long term purchase. However, the headaches I've been having lately are making me want to rip my eyes out and hopefully you all could help me avoid losing my jelly filled sight organs.

The problem. Whenever I play games (Bioshock, HL2), about 30secs-2min into the game, the game freezes and I get the repetitious feedback of whichever sound just played (ie. an explosion again and again and again and again... until I close the program). At first I thought it was just a Bioshock thing, since so many people have been having issues with it but when i went to play Half Life 2, I was getting the same problem.

In addition to game problems I constantly have the sidebar not be able to run at start up and once or twice I've had a memory dump even though nothing was running.

Is these problems all linked to Vista? Is it my hardware possibly? What can I do to check for problems and then fix them?

*I'm updating my sound drivers as I type this, so maybe thats the problem. I have all the newest drives for my GPU. Might I also need to update my mobo bios/drivers?

Thank you all in advance for any ideas. I'm at my wits end.

Heya. Since posting I've updated every single driver for all the components of my computer. I've also logged my system/cpu temps while stressing my computer and during game play. Idling I was at 20C and under stress I was never above 40C. Other weird thing is that while playing Oblivion at the highest settings I don't crash like with Bioshock or HL2.