Got the full game, love it, but I'm having some really nasty problems (some of which I haven't seen listed here).
I'm having that same CTD, and one complete reboot error in missions.
And a ton of screen flicker, but only on the menu portions of the game - not the flight simulation.
The music randomly cuts off, and isn't heard again untill a reboot.
And there's a really wierd graphics bug when a bunch of cap ships get on the screen at the same time, blocks appear everywhere, the game stops. Changing to another screen (engineering, hitting esc etc), clears it up for a moment, then it comes back.
If this is all known stuff, cool, if not, here's a bug report.
I'm running a PIV 2.4, 512 megs of ram, a Audigy 2 Platinum ZS sound card, and a GForce 4 5600 Pro, latest drivers on all of them (I even checked last night again to be sure), and the latest edition of DirectX 9.
Ideas please