Not a bad copy just a bad operating system hence Vistas shelf life, Win7 is just Vista V1.001 by the looks of it & fixed Jack so 2 choices.
go through the posts the for Win7 & Vista its the same animal or replace your operating system, I got it working fine before getting fed up of fighting it hijacking stuff so upgraded back to XP
Try turning Avast off before running but doubt its doing anything to effect, I would turn off all background tasks to isolate the problem & free memory but would not think thats a problem on a new machine.
Why did you shut down using task manager had the program frozen? Never heard of anything but graphics & sound probs.