Most likely to be a driver (or even hardware) bug. I had a SB AWE32 card which would do that, and I even hacked on the driver for a while to try to diagnose it before concluding the soundcard was probably taking PCI bus master and never releasing it, not really something that Linux could do anything about.
It's possible that the equivalent Windows driver - which didn't crash - had a secret workaround to prevent it from tickling the hardware bug. I used to work on OS-9 drivers for custom hardware at my first job, and we usually ended up bodging the driver to fix hardware bugs, because respinning the hardware was terribly expensive or even not possible in the time available.
Creative was notorious for having chipset-specific PCI bus master issues even on Windows. The only way to fix it was to disable bus master, and that is what Creative drivers did on Windows.
On Linux you were expected to be a grown boy and do it yourself in the BIOS.
It's possible that the equivalent Windows driver - which didn't crash - had a secret workaround to prevent it from tickling the hardware bug. I used to work on OS-9 drivers for custom hardware at my first job, and we usually ended up bodging the driver to fix hardware bugs, because respinning the hardware was terribly expensive or even not possible in the time available.