well, hold on, 1st of all, just so we r clear, its crashing some time after the whole "hold down these buttons for this long" thing, right?
i am on vista and jailbroke w/ redsn0w recently. i tried 7.1, 7.2, and 8.0, all w/ that problem. i tried putting it in compatability mode for xp sp2 and running as admin. still didnt work. i did some serarching till i found soem1 w/ the exact same story. they said they tried putting it in compatability for windows 95 just to try, and it worked. so i tried it, and voila, it worked!