Consistent Crashing At Beginning Of Chapter 17

[Lazarus187]

If problem persists, uninstalling the game, deleting its folder and reinstalling it and 1.1 patch may also help.

Figures....following your last suggestion seems to have finally resolved the problem, at least for the time being. Just for the record, I've had AMD's dual-core optimizing utility installed and running for several years now, and I do have the latest display drivers from Nvidia as well.

Now that I've got the game running at least, I wanted to see if you have some suggestions for improving the rather abysmal framerates of this resource-hogging game. Here are the settings I'm running the game at now:

Resolution:  1280 x 1024
VSync:  Off
Shader Model:  2.0  ( Whatever that means )
Hardware Physics:  Off
Advanced PhysicX Effects:  Off
Texture Resolution:  Medium
Normal Maps:  Medium
Specular Maps:  Medium ( Does this refer to weapon speculars? )
Shadows:  Medium
Motion Blur:  Off
Water Reflect:  On
Water Caustic:  On  ( What is this? )
Anisotropic Filtering:  Off
Antialiasing:  Off

I'd hate to lower the resolution, as most games begin looking rather "grainy" below 1280 x 1024. I'm not really certain which of the aforementioned settings is "draining" the most resources on my system, nor do I know if this game is CPU or GPU dependent, or both. On that note, here are my system specs:

OS:  Windows XP Home Edition (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 3
CPU:  AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 Dual Core Processor ~2.6GHz 
GPU:  BFG NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 ~896.0 MB
Sound:  Creative Labs  SB Audigy 2 ZS Audio [7000] 
RAM:  2048 MB

In any event, you've been a GREAT help, and I do sincerely appreciate your advice and assistance. Have a great one.