Good ol Adobe, making really crappy software and trusting people will blame Windows. Which is of course why Jobs banned their crap from iPads. Obviously Windows shouldn’t be giving Flash all the resources just because it asks for them, but Adobe shouldn’t make Flash more of an unstable pig every release either.
I figure there must be some conflict or incompatibility between what Flash is doing and what Windows, and the underlying x86 hardware expects, that cause these crashes, which take as you said a long time to complete, I’ve never timed them, but a minute or longer is standard, I think.