Crazy developments:
First off, I've read the FAQ, and tried many of the things (compatibility mode for xp sp2, I run in admin, etc.... interesting, changing the exe so that it "runs in Admin mode" causes the game to not even load period... freezes on video). Nothing had an effect.And even though the error log I sent you might have indicated I was using EVGA precision, the log must have been outdated or something because I had already turned it off and went back to factory clocks by the time I wrote here. But, it's definitely not an overclocking-related problem (I can run Crysis on high/very high settings with the OC, causes the game to chug at points, but no stability problems).I COULD'VE tried rolled back the drivers, and I would've, had I not made the discovery I just made. Perhaps the 180.60 drivers are at fault, but, whatever the case, it's really weird (I really didn't want to give up on 180.60 because they made a big performance boost in general, especially for Crysis). You see, I noticed that in my testing after the cutscene, the game's crashing was dependent more or less on how much was on screen. Since, if you look to the left more, there's more bandits, this causes the game to crash. If you run to the right and keep your view off to the right, you'll be fine. Doing a 180 turn (f key) will surely cause the game to crash every time. So, the likelihood of a crash seemed to be related to how much was going on onscreen. Also, I found very interesting
how the game would crash. Typically, the colors would get all weird, the clothing of the models would be removed (so, that it would just be a bunch of blank-skinned models running around), things would flash in and out, lots of weird neon green stuff... anyway, it was like stuff wasn't being read into the vRAM properly. Hitting escape to go to the menu before the game crashed would generally prevent it from crashing, however the textures/colors were all still messed up, and often you couldn't see anything on the menu. Going back to the game would be a certain crash, however, if I was able to select "quit" (by randomily guessing where my mouse pointer was), and go back to the main menu, everything was fine with the game. So, based on these observations, I decided to play around with the graphical settings. The results were most interesting...I ended up finding out that having the grass quality set to "high" was the culprit of the crashing. Very odd and peculiar. If I had every setting turned to max, but grass set to medium, the game was perfectly stable, and no more crashing would occur. However, even if I had every single setting set to the absolute lowest possible setting, but had grass set to high, the game would crash! Now how odd is that? I guess it's possible the driver is the culprit, but, more likely it seems like a corrupted texture of some sort that's causing the game to become unstable. Now, if it's something related to a texture or data for the high quality grass, would such a texture have been created by a bad install? Or perhaps there is a real bug/flaw in the game? I had been playing the game up to this point, as I said, crash free, and with all settings on the max quality. Perhaps someone will find this info useful. Either way, I guess I can continue playing now... I will periodically try putting high quality grass back on and see if it still causes crashes anymore.