I am also having issues with Vista and this game.
Specs:
i7 920
6gb ram
GTX 280
Realtek ALC888 sound card with latest drivers
Vista 64 SP1
I tried the work around listed with swapping out the mss32.dll (took me a while to find one to download as the link is dead) and it still crashed during load.
I then I replaced the mss32.dll with one from my NWN folder (yeah its old) and the game will now run, but with no sound. (NWN has sound)
I also noticed that the wav files won't play in windows media player, it gives a codec not found error. (I have the latest version)
Any ideas?