I figured out what the problem was. There appears to be a problem with the game's GLSL Shaders. My video card support this feature from what I can tell from the other games that I play. However for whatever reason when this option is on it causes the game to crash when going to or from the battlescape view.
Now, for the time being I have it disabled. The battlescape seems to work fine as I was able to play it for a few minutes, pop a few alien heads, and then I manually exited the fight because I'm swamped with things to do. I will look at it further a little little and see if I can get you some more details.