an interest (and positive) update:
the offending driver program didnt seen to be consistent with the dozen or so recent BSOD episodes.
a couple of websites suggested that i try temporarily disabling avast-antivirus, which i did.
well, i currently (or concurrently if you will) am running four (count 'em, FOUR!) of the video-conversion program and no BSOD's. the CPU is not too happy with me, but this does make an interesting test.
with avast on, even only one process with the video-conversion program running seems to cause the BSOD issue.
note too that this happens right after a fresh new OS install, so i figure its nothing to do with viruses or anything like that.
so, i am ready to write this one off to some odd conflict between windows-7, the video-converter, and avast.
Vezina - thank you for your suggestion to run the BlueScreenView program. i took the html display of the latest dumps and sent them to the video-conversion program author.