Savegames causing crashes? Halfway through the game...

Within the last day, I've started crashing to desktop within 30 seconds of opening a saved game. I'm not getting a *message* saying my saves are corrupted, but that's how it's acting, after over a month of playing daily without problems. My character is about to sail to Caladon so I think I'm halfway through the game, and would rather not restart... (Yes, I play RPGs ridiculously slowly.)

The patches (official and UAP, and hi-res) were installed immediately after I installed the game from GOG - so that's not the issue. I also used arc_editor a week ago, but not recently enough to explain this. I uninstalled Eset and installed Avast very recently, but I crash even when I temporarily disable Avast. It happens more frequently when loading any new area, but eventually will CTD when standing around. It's as if the game thinks it's "timing out"...

So far I've tried:
--Going back to a somewhat older save, but could go back farther...though I don't want to replay to this point only to have the same problem, of course.
--Running in XP SP2 compatibility mode and 256 colors.
--Quickly exiting the area I started in and going to another subsection (Tarant, sewers vs. Bates mansion vs. city streets) to confirm it's not solely location based.
--Deleting extraneous old saves and manually deleting the auto save file.
--Restraining my auto-saving tendencies since I've now read that frequent saving leads to corruption, but it seems like the damage is done.

Are there any ways to tweak existing save files to play nice? FWIW, my save slots are ~4mb at this point, data.sav is 46kb, and data2.save is 2kb. No idea what they should be, though.

(I don't think any of this matters given that it ran fine for over a month, but just in case, here are very limited specs:
Windows 7 Pro 64-bit
Nvidia 560 Ti
AMD dual core 3GHz)

 

Well, I've been playing Skyrim for over a month, but my attention span for such games is just not the same as for old top-down RPGs

So here's a last ditch attempt at this...

Has anyone else encountered corruption/crashing like this before? And did going back to a notably older save (and reducing save-frequency) allow you to continue playing, or did the same problem come up before long?

Thanks

 

Try disabling one of the cores, giving arcanum.exe a higher priority, test a whole new game (which if that's the problem would be the worst case, sorry), or installing arcanum again to a different folder (also not in program files folder) and moving your savegames over.

I've never had problems like this but it's just some ideas. Only problems I ever had were some modding ended up corrupting some saves.

 

Thanks, Leonidus.

I've tried the core limiting before with no change and/or success. I couldn't figure out a successful way to set it up permanently from the shortcut, so it turned into me doing it after the game opened, which caused problems of its own. Still, I can look into that again.

I'll try out the reinstall-to-a-different-place idea in the future. Doesn't exactly make sense that it should affect anything - but the initial problem doesn't make sense to me either At least then I could move the older, pre-crash savegames and sort of start fresh.

Now, if only I was capable of managing my quicksaving addiction...