It recently occured to me after hours of different graphics settings tweaking and fiddling with the config files, that the game always seemed to crash almost immediately after pressing a key (normally escape or F5) which ended up with APPCRASH, Kernel32.dll etc. So what was my solution? Don't use the keyboard
Seriously, I played for 3 hours last night with no crashes now that I've banned myself from using the keyboard. Give it a try and let me know if this helps anyone else. I should probably add that this was with version 1.7.
Kyairan.