Hello.
I have almost the same problem, as mentioned by Twinks (The instruction at 0x6972da53 referenced to memory at 0x00000000. Memory could not be "read"), but I have a suspicion what might have happened it. I have a HP Pavilion notebook powered by AMD Sempron 3000+ processor with nVidia GeForce4 Go 420 32 MB (WinXP Home PL SP2 fully patched). When I installed the game, I had installed graphic drivers obtained from HP website. They were pretty old (version 72.30 B, released on March 30th, 2005), but the game worked fine. When I changed the drivers to the newest built - ForceWare ver. 97.20, the game began to crash on startup. As far as I remember, Twinks also has nVidia-based graphic card on-board. So maybe there is a problem with new video drivers from nVidia...
PS. I look forward for the problem to be solved, because the game is absolutely GREAT!!!
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best regards