After months of having IE7 crash whenever loading anything more than simple content, I have finally worked out the problem. I've been blaming Vista for this since the beginning and it seems, alas, I was wrong. The culprit was Nvidia's Network Access Manager which somehow made its way onto my machine. 

Before getting rid of it, I could never load complex sites like Facebook. Fortunately I'm sick to death of Facebook so i could live with it, but it made me feel like something was wrong with my super cool Alienware high spec rig. After all, Internet explorer is so ingrained into Vista, that it makes you nervous whenever it seems rather unwell. 

Makes you wonder how many other issues with Vista are actually issues with third party vendors. You would think they would fix an issue like that but hey...