I've got the game working relatively well at the moment. Hopefully it will last.

My problems were the following:

1. EXTREMELY long load times.
2. Hitting "quick save" hung up the computer for a good thirty seconds or crashed it completely
3. Same with trying to get back to menu screen during gameplay
4. Just plain bizarre things - crashes for no reason, hitting "return" to skip cinematics caused crash, etc.

My system:

GeForce 4 Ti4200
PIV 1.4 Ghz
384 MB Ram
Win XP Home

I just bought the GeForce yesterday for the sole purpose of playing this game, so I assumed the drivers were up to date. It's the VisionTek model. In any case, downloaded the latest Detonator drivers from NVIDIA just to make sure. Perhaps this helped somewhat, but I still experienced crashes after doing this.

So, I made the following changes in the settings, based on another poster's "settings" list (thanks, btw - can't remember the name at the moment).

The main thing I did was drop down to the 1024 resolution and then turn the FSAA setting to "off." I turned the "vert sync" to off as well as the "alias shaders." I made sure the "Quincunx" setting was off, too (who comes up with these words?).

I kept most of the rest of the settings maxed.

So far so good - frame rate is great and the hang-ups and freezes are gone.

I then got greedy and tried maxing everything out again and going up to the next resolution. The game crashed.

So, there still seem to be some real issues here, but at least I can live with this until a patch is available.

The game is great, but these headaches really make things tough going initially.

Anyway, hope this helps someone. I have no idea why it worked for me, but, so far, it seems to have.

Good luck...