Why are Speedfan and Coretemp unstable for me?

whenever i use speed fan it not only seems to read things incorrectly but it tends to give me BSOD's
even simply uninstalling it. this has happened on my old machine once and my new rig, shown in my signiture, several times under several installs of windows (i've installed windows a total of 6 times on it so far trying to get everything working just right)
plus i've found that when i open it my kernal jumps to a steady 25-40% and stays there, even AFTER the program has been shut down.... i have to restart my computer to get my kernal to behaive again
consistantly a poor program for me - yet everyone here and on XS loves it!
so i'm guessing that i must be doing something wrong. any ideas?

i do have AI suite installed and running at start. but i dont have Probe going when i use other monitoring programs. i'm not OCing with it at all. keep thinking i should turn off the startup processes, but i dont know if that will have any negitive effects on my machine (??)

as for Coretemp, it reads fine and doesn't tend to give BSOD's (often) but will generally never stay running more than 10-20 minutes before crashing out. so i cant use it for monitoring... again... what am i doing wrong here?

i should note that these issues arise even at stock settings.

Which OS are you running (including any SP installed), and what's the exact error message in the BSOD?

XP SP2 - fully up to date
didn't record the error... at that time i hadn't set my blue screen to pause yet so it would restart the comp too fast
but even just now
i tried to use coretemp with OCCT but coretemp errored out on me after just a few minutes
running OCCT with no monitoring gives no errors, i've ran a few hours on orthos and prime95 - no "big" test yet though... but i dont think it is a stability issue...

also, to add to this, i tried using everest (latest "ultimate" edition...) with OCCT to monitor my voltages, but it didn't offer monitoring for the NB and SB or mem like it did for people on the forums...
i could manually go in and view these values in everest under different sections but i cant seem to find an option to load them into the shared memory
all it does offer me though is vcore and then my standard 3/5/12 lines...
and it tends to error out a bit as well, but not nearly as badly as the others...
on close though, it seems to error out every time, better than crashing atleast...
mind you, i can run F@H for days or play crysis or WIC for several hours and have no issues (other than my crappy laser mouse lagging on me, but i dont think that is stability either...)

i'm testing a new clock at the moment, but i'll try to reproduce the BSOD from speedfan here shortly