DeskScapes crashes for me after a few seconds when I'm using a dream that plays video. I think the one you tried is one of those. What happens for me is that it freezes. Then if I do anything like open a window, it becomes clear that explorer has crashed.

In XP, If you do a Ctrl Alt Delete, select the processes tab, and then select exporer.exe and press the End Process button, then File/New Task (Run...) and type explorer.exe, you can get your desktop back. But then you have to Right click the desktop and go to Properties/ Desktop tab and select a different wallpaper and apply and close before Deskscapes crashes exporer again. Sorry I don't know if Vista is different.

You might want to try the one called Bouncing Box Sample and see how long that runs without crashing. It uses directx 3d instead of video, so if your DirectX is in order it should run without problems. I've been running that so far without a crash. I haven't solved the video problem but I know Dreamscapes is pretty picky about video card drivers, video codecs, and video cards. Looks like your card is pretty new so PCI-E? If so that is a good thing. Deskscapes doesn't like some AGP and ATI. Do you know what video codec you have for playing DVDs?

Last night, I had another snow crash, while DeskScapes wasn't even installed. A bit of Web research showed that there's a long-standing issue with NVidia's display drivers that leads to slowdowns, driver resets, and BSODs on some rigs. When it happens, Windows reports an error in nvlddmkm.sys. The first time it happened, my screen was too trashed to read, but the second time I could make out the nvlddmkm BSOD behind the snow.

In short, this is probably an issue with my GPU or its drivers, not with DeskScapes.