I have a new HP laptop. It came with Vista Home Basic. The system was stable at first, but probably after letting the Microsoft Update tool update some of the HW drivers the OS began to occasionally crash (and create a memory dump). For instance, it always crashed when tried to install a certain MS Office update pack (from a file, not from the update site).
I never discovered the exact cause (or causes) of the problem, but after I reinstalled each and every original device driver from the HP site the PC seems to be stable again.
Possibly the problem could have affected also MC, but I didn't install it before reverting the drivers.