Lt, I've been having the same irritating problem of CTDs occurring while loading up my second battle. I can play my campaign, start a battle, have a fine time, but the second I start a 2nd battle it CTDs. It doesn't matter which faction my army fights against, or in what order. I've played SPQR from it's earliest betas, and have never had this problem before.
I've tried just about everything by now. Clean installs, new drivers, new campaigns, lower settings, and the problem keeps occuring. However, I've noticed that there's definitely some patterns to it.
For starters, the problem begins ONLY after the marius reforms. This caused me to stop playing one campaign, since I thought the save game became corrupted, but it then occurred again in another.
I thought, then, that the problem was that the textures on one of the post marian units was causing the crash, but after singling out each available unit and throwing it into a few battles I realized that this was not the case. I did discover though that the CTD did not occur if I only attacked wth 1 unit. I could run a dozen battles where I attacked the guals or the germans with just archers, late cav, or spearman aux. HOWEVER, if I took all those units, lumped them into a stack, and then attacked, the CTD would occur as I loaded up the second battle.
After digging through a million forum posts, I came across one which you wrote that the high res gloss files that SPQR uses could be causing CTD by overloading a graphic card's video memory:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=31041
I think this may be what is causing my game to crash, especially considering that it doesn't happen when playing vanilla, BI, or RTR. Just SPQR. Is there anyway for me to fix this problem? Will 5.0 shrink the size of the gloss files for units? Should I try to swap new skins in for all the post Marian units?
Any help I can get would be relaly appreciated. I'm using a Radeon 9600 with 256 MB RAM, 2600+ Athlon, 1 gig of ram, if this helps.