Continued EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION errors

[hwsf]

Despite patch 1.01 SST continues to be plagued by severe stability issues for me. Later missions (especially after Mission 18) almost routinely crash every few turns with the dreaded EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION error message. The error always gets triggered during the AI movement phase.

With a lot of patience and a mounting sense of frustration I made it to the last mission (#31), which is the first one I am absolutely not able to complete. The game always hangs after I end my first turn in that mission and the program exits with the above mentioned error message after displaying the "Hidden Movement" screen for a few minutes.

I have installed the game on two completely distinct machines. My desktop running Windows 7 64 bit and a notebook running XP SP3 with the same behavior on both machines.

I have to say, it is beyond me how a product with quality issues this significant can make it to release (clearly I'm not the only one getting these error messages).

Any help for how I could work around this would be much appreciated.