http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/grasping.html
The testing confirms that the driver meets certain standards and requirements.
It does not indicate a lack of crashing. The driver testing is there to stop even worse shit from happening (again, stuff that hasn't been seen publicly in a while because measures were undertaken specifically to stop it). These measures were started in 64-bit XP and are either a boon or a burden depending on who you are in the chain. Things like corrupting the memory of other programs, snooping user data and sending it out, there's all sorts of things (purposeful and accidental) drivers can do (as they run above the standard user rights level) if they're not kept in check.
Of course, if companies are coding to these standards for everything except 32-bit XP, then of course the higher quality of software is going to affect anything they make for 32-bit XP as well.
Why should I go out of my way and make you a list just to have you say "I don't use any of those so they don't matter"?
No, less crashes from drivers is NOT arguable.
http://static.usenix.org/event/lisa06/tech/full_papers/ganapathi/ganapathi.pdf
However with Vista/7/8, a graphics driver crash (which can still happen) cannot cause a BSoD because it's not hooked into the kernel. You just get something like this instead.
I could probably find other studies and statistics as well. Whenever Windows crashes, it (by default) makes a crash dump file with info on what was going on at the time. If the issue is a driver or system file, it only takes seconds to find which one caused the crash. Hell, go to C:\Windows\Minidump\ on your personal machine, and if there's any dump files in there than that machine has crashed, and I can tell you whether it was a driver, known config issue, or hardware failure.
Basically I'm just saying that this info is easy to find out there because Windows logs it, and people use the crash dumps to find what went wrong. If something tends to go wrong for tons of people repeatedly, it's going to become noticeable. This is why Microsoft changed it with NT6, they realized that separating the drivers from the kernel itself would improve system stability by not allowing one third-party driver to crash everything else on the system at once.
There were also changes to the sound and networking system for stability, but they're not as drastic, and sound/networking drivers historically haven't had as many issues.
Have you not been reading? In Vista/7/8, a graphics driver crash will NOT crash your system. I have said that multiple times already as it's one of the biggest upsides.
"I don't need something so I assume nobody else does!"
I bring up the volume mixer
every single day to individually lower the volume of and mute games and certain programs. For example I play Warframe online while skyping with friends, and one of them keeps his mic volume low because he's in a college dorm. Because of this, the game's sound overpowers his voice. With the volume mixer, I can quickly reduce the game's sound so it doesn't overpower his voice and we can communicate while playing. In addition, sometimes I leave games running in the background, and will want to lower to mute them in order to watch a youtube video, without having to kill the game totally and then bring it back up after.
The benefits to multiple volume levels holds true for recording as well. I often have to tweak the volume levels of individual programs when I'm
making a tutorial,
recording server gameplay with people over teamspeak,
showing off a game hack I made,
playing a private session over Skype,
filing a bug report,
showing off a ROM hack somebody made, or any number of things where I don't want one audio source to overpower another.
It has to happen eventually. People tend to only cave in and change something when it stops working at all, which is why it often takes so long that nobody remembers how it worked in the first place.
I'm not talking about additional Microsoft software, but there's other things that need the new systems. New VM software, new VPN software, things like that that even businesses would require.
For the first one, it holds true for software in general. Replacement is a costly job in general (time, manpower, etc.), and becomes multiple times more costly and time-consuming if you only hire tech-illterates.
On a more serious note, Windows doesn't have a set release schedule, many places upgraded to Vista, then started moving machines to 7 (due to the relatively-short timespan between them), and will have a mix of the two, for example.