Blue Screen of Death or Total Freeze

Okay, so this problem has happened to me once or twice in the past few months, but in the past week or so it's become unbearable. When starting my computer (from sleep or otherwise), my computer will occasionally freeze. I'm not talking something I can hit Ctrl+Shift+Delete on, but all sound, and movement is totally stopped. To clarify, this doesn't happen while windows is starting, but up to a minute after windows has started and is functioning. Sometimes instead of completely freezing and forcing a hard restart, it will come up as a blue screen of death. Sometimes it will finish it's emergency dump, other times it will freeze half way through that. I've written down the important (hopefully) information on the stop error screen:

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
jibber jabber about first time or not, and what to do if you installed stuff, resets etc.
Technical info:
***STOP: 0X0000000A (0X0000000000000020, 0X0000000000000002, 0X0000000000000000, 0XFFFFF800038B1504)
Crash dump information goes here.

What's interesting about this problem is if the computer manages to get past the first minute without having a heart attack, it works perfectly fine. If it does have a heart attack, only the monitor freezes - the actual computer purrs away as if nothing happened. I haven't installed anything of note, and would like to avoid a factory reset if at all possible. The issue I have can happen three or four times in a row (holding the power button till shut down, waiting then rebooting), or start up the first time perfectly fine, or somewhere in between. It's starting to get really frustrating, but I'm also worried if there's something seriously wrong with my computer, or if I'm causing permanent damage. Just some added info: I use windows 7

Help? :confused:
If you need some more information, just let me know and I'll add what you need as soon as I can. Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I hope you have the answer!
Thanks,
Dennis