Essentially it's a compatibility/conflict problem and means that the USB device is not being assigned correctly and the resulting IRQ (Interrupt ReQuest) conflict causes a crash because the processor is probably being told to deal with information for more than one device on the same IRQ. That would be fine if the driver was coded correctly for the new model in Vista and Win7 but if not then expect problems.
Those of us who grew up having to set manual IRQ's in the BIOS and software of a computer will remember how annoying it could be. These days the software does all of that for you and usually gets it right.. usually. You can still force an IRQ for a device onto a specific channel but I don't know if that would just make things worse under Win7/Vista.
Definitely better to use a modern driver or simply re-install the old one and hope that Win7 makes a better guestimate about how to assign its IRQ channels.