Vista - Mafia (the game) crash on quit

Every time I try to select quit from the game (Mafia), I get a windows "Mafia has stopped responding".
It would be bad enough if it were just that, but it locks out my mouse as well, and makes it difficult to shut down the application in task manager. Pretty much the whole system locks up.
And this is just from selecting 'quit' from within the game!

I've just switched over from xp and vista is just giving me all kinds of headaches... my Saitek gamepad isn't working and there seems to be nothing I can do about it, and now random games are crashing that weren't crashing before. I think I'm starting to understand most users' frustrations with windows.
Things that worked just fine in xp just dont seem to work in vista.

Is there some sort of magical setting I'm missing here??