Late 2008 MacBook Pro unibody - Hard Freezes under Vista 32bit

Question

Hi folks,
I am a relatively new Mac fan (started a few years ago when I purchased a Mac Mini for home because I didn't want to suffer Windows at home as well as at work!)
Anyhoo, late last year I purchased a MacBook Pro Unibody jobbie so that I could have the best of both worlds for my work. I can run Visual Studio under Vista for C++ development under boot-camp and run the Mac and OSX for just about everything else.
However: I have a problem that is testing my patience to brand new levels. In summary:
About once every couple of hours or so (and it's not reliable: could be after 30 seconds, could last several hours) Vista freezes. And I mean freeze: it takes a "hold the power button down" routine to get out of it. This, of course, has made Vista and lots of my work pretty upset. There's nothing quite like writing to a file when this happens for maximum tears. I'm running through tissues like you'd never believe
I have done some research on this over the months and have tried many possible solutions including, but not limited to, ensuring that I'm fully patched up and that there is no suspicious software, updating all the drivers (paying particular attention to NVIDIA's ones - as a DirectX/OpenGL programmer for the past 10 years I'm acutely aware of how touchy they are). None of these have worked.
The closest I've come to something that looks like a solution is this thingie called Riva Tuner; but it does not recognise the April 2009 NVIDIA drivers.
I understand that it could be linked with something NVIDIA's drivers do to speed up/slow down the cards depending on load/heat/whatever.
I'm so far down my tether at this point I really do not know where to turn. I love my MacBook, but I need Bootcamp and Vista to do my job. It was my choice to get a Mac rather than a PC, so I guess it's my own fault. I have seen many other users on the Internet who have the same problem but none of them appears to have a fool-proof resolution to this issue.
Thus, I thought I'd come here, get my best begging trousers on and grovel to Apple and to the learned users here to see if there is something that I can do to get everything working again so that I can continue to bask in the MacBook Pro glory knowing that my Vista installation is reliable.
Grovelling over,
Mr Cuttle.
Message was edited by: Mr Cuttle

Answer 1

Do you have anything against running Windows in a VM (virtual machine) under OSX to do your work? On the unibody, this is much more stable than boot camp in my experience.
here are the steps I took
1) install smcfancontrol in OSX
http://www.eidac.de/
2) install virtualbox free virtualization software from Sun Microsystems
http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/2.2.2/VirtualBox-2.2.2-46594-OSX.dmg
3) install Windows using virtualbox like normal; use smcfancontrol to bump fan speeds if it runs hot (normally not needed unless you watch video or game).
4) turn on seamless mode and run your windows apps side by side with OSX apps for free.
if you have issues setting it up, read here:
http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/UserManual.html
this video shows how it works, albeit with a weird Japanese game app instead of Visual C++
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z47MKa9Jdwk
and this screenshot that I took shows just how much you can do with this:
http://img505.imageshack.us/img505/5916/picture1zdk.png