SS6.4 Steam consistent crashing mid battle

[fireball900]

So I played a bit of MTW2 just to get a feel for it, and then, knowing how the Total War Series works, went looking for the best mod.
I found this and installed it; first 6.3, then the 6.4 patch. It won't run normally (due to the lack of kingdsoms.exe it has), but I can get it to start either by renaming the folder to 'americas' (and renaming the americas to 'AmericasOLD') OR by using the universal mod launcher I found for MTW2.
Started up a campaign as the HRE; The campaign runs beautifully, looks brilliant. Except that every battle I run - campaign or custom - the game crashes mid battle - it freezes for a bit, then the little box with 'this program encountered a problem and had to close.' Varying size, faction, type, location or weather doesn't seem to help, so I'm assuming it's something to do with the animation, but I can't find the right log to check. It's not with the first death, or first... anything... that I can see either.

I also reinstalled the 6.4 patch to check if it was that - no luck.
I'm going to redownload the 6.3 & 6.4 files now to see if that was the problem, but seeing as my download speed has been ridiculously slow recently (I'm currently doing <10kb a second, when I should be doing at least 1mb/sec)...

Any ideas?

[Riva]

Please read this thread: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...tering-battles

[fireball900]

I've now redownloaded, reinstalled SS (so it's not a bad download/install). Also installed the bugfix. Sti; crashes mid-battle. Said thread didn't help - whether I use a renamed modfolder or the launcher (normally the launcher) I still have midbattle crashes.

[fireball900]

I get 'an unhandled win32 exception occured in Medieval2.exe [4812].
And I now have a workaround - it currently seems that if I disable sound using the game menu (check the box under sound options) it doesn't crash.

[Riva]

Ok, thats more related to hardware/driver than an issue with steam. Try to install / reinstall the latest driver for your audio device and do not select any Creative EAX effects in audio settings.

[fireball900]

Finally got the spare time (and drive) to tackle the problem.

I've fixed the problem, thanks Riva. It wasn't quite what you thought, but you put me on the right track.
I've solved (at least apparantly, I've fought a half-dozen battles) the problem by change the kingdoms.exe and medieval2.exe to run in compatability mode (Windows XP SP3) and Admin Mode - probably the compatibility that fixed it.
Figured I should post this as I know I get incredibly annoyed when I find an old thread detailing a problem I'm having that is left unsolved