Anyone else get routine CTD during battles?

[yankeepyrate]

Almost all of my land battles and in fact ALL of my naval battles result in CTDs about 5-9 minutes into the battle. Game performance is perfect up until the instant of crash, at which point I'm swiftly and unceremoniously dumped to desktop. I've had zero campaign map crashes so far - but I've only been trodding thru RTI...haven't ventured into GC yet.
There is no lag, stuttering, or performance deterioration of any kind prior to the crash, it just happens.

Tweaking my GPU settings via the hardware control panel instead of in-game has greatly increased the visuals and fluidity. (8800GT) I've also defragged, run spybot, updated drivers for the whole system, adjusted empire.exe priority in task manager, closed other background processes...about all that's left is overclocking the gpu and cpu...which I'm prepared to try. My GPU shipped overclocked, but there is room to stretch it a bit more.

It just seems like it's not so much a hardware issue as it is some sort of memory leak or bug. Doesn't matter what graphic settings I use...from low to ultra and everything in between, the CTD still happens. But my game runs smooth and looks stunning - DOF, HDR, Volumetric, all looks great.

Curious who else is encountering this, because I read a TON of posts about campaign map CTD, but not that much about in-battle.

[Ondaderthad]

When I see a computer with several MagicISO virtual drives and Nero tools I get suspicious.

[yankeepyrate]

Ha! Yeah, I can understand how that looks bad.
Nero came preinstalled on my pc, never even heard of it until then. The ISO's have nothing to do with ETW whatsoever. I've been a TW fan since Shogun, and lined up on ETW's release to plunk down my $50 for what I thought would be the ultimate gaming experience. And for those brief shining moments when it works...it IS.