Gateway P 7901 Locks up while playing games+using usb mouse

I recieved a Gateway P7901 for christmas. It has a Core 2 Q9000 running at 2.0 ghz, 4 gigs of ram and an nividia GTX 260M. It's currently running Vista 64-bit. I've got the latest drivers from Nvidia for the 260m, and checked most of my drivers to make sure I'm up to date.

My issue is this: When plugging in certain usb mice and playing games, it will lock up within a minute or two. I've tried 3 mice so-far, (all of them logitech) and think I've narrowed the problem down to only mice that are drawing power from the laptop itself.

I installed and played Crysis: Warhead without issue the first day of use, borrowing my brothers Logitech M305 (i think that's the model) notebook mouse to use instead of the trackpad. The mouse has a tiny usb dongle, and takes a single AA battery, so it's power usage is kept independent of the laptop. It worked fine for the entirety of the day with this set up.

The other two mice I've tried were MX510 (a pretty standard wired mouse) and the MX700 (a wireless mouse with a usb receiver/charging station). Both of these mice resulted in hard-locks requiring a reboot. I've played Crysis with the trackpad, and plugged in the MX510 after a few minutes of play, resulting in an immediate hard lock as well.

I should note that I also was treated to a nice BSOD only once while playing Anno 1404: Dawn of Discovery. I assume this was from the same issue, the MX700 being the culprit this particular time.

Playing games with the track pad and no mice plugged into the usb ports lets me play with no problems.

I guess there is an easy solution in me buying the M305 for myself, but I'm also a little worried that the usb issue could affect other thing (external harddrives, etc.)