Hi Marc,
I can not reproduce this crash on my Vista development computer or on a fresh installation of Windows XP, Python 2.5.4, Numpy 1.3, matplotlib 0.99, basemap 0.99.4 in a VM. All examples work (some depend on PIL).
Can you run these commands without crash?
python -c "import _geoslib"
python -c "from mpl_toolkits.basemap import _geod"
python -c "from mpl_toolkits.basemap import _proj"
These basemap/geos C modules depend on MSVCR71.DLL and MSVCP71.DLL, which are not included in the basemap installer.
Christoph