Games crashing to desktop

Windows Vista Business x64
nVidia XFX 8600GT
Drivers are updated

I've been trying to figure out if there is a common factor relating to some of my games consistently crashing to the desktop while others seem to work just fine.

On games like Bioshock, The Witcher, and Americas Army, the game tries to load then crashes to the desktop. I can usually make it work by either right-clicking on the crashed application in my taskbar and clicking on restore.

When that doesn't work I can sometimes make them work by madly double clicking on the expanded game window even when I only have a blank screen.

What I'm trying to figure out is if this is a Vista problem or a driver problem, or even a combination of the two.

I've also tried running in compatibility mode for Windows XP and with Administrative privileges and no success.

is the app actually crashing? or is it just minimising to desktop? COD5 does that to me all the time after initial startup , you will be wasting your time trying to troubleshoot it mate trust me , it just seems to one of those things , alt/tab quite often restores it straight away.