I think you're right that the problem is in the Slow/Freeze spell the Troll King throws out. Just did a quick test - ran down into the cave, got slowed, teleported out and tried clicking on the "Ruined Armor" near the cave and crashed. On the next load, I ran down, triggered the cutscene and teleported out without getting slowed. Walked to the Ruined Armor and was able to click on it without any crashing.
My next test will be to see if I get crashes after some generic troll bashing. Since the King doesn't key on you until you're pretty close (and doesn't move randomly), should be easy to clear the cave all except for him.
Worst case scenario (if indeed the spell effect is what is causing the problem), I can do some save/load exploiting to try and beat the king without being slowed <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />
You say they "restarted the game" - does that mean they started a new game, or just reloaded?
EDIT:
I don't think the freeze spell has anything to do with it - I just ran into the cave, triggered the cutscene and ran around a little bit (trying to pull the King to the back of the cave) and crashed before I was able to teleport out. I hadn't been slowed at that point. :sigh:
The only definite thing I can say is that going into the cave is causing problems. I haven't been able to nail down if triggering the cutscene is causing the crashes or not. Also, the crashes seem to change. I haven't been getting Windows message boxes telling me what module caused the crash, but generally it was either div.exe or "unknown" - lately, I've just been dumped to my desktop instantly. The crashes on item interaction are generally in the div.exe file and the totally random-while-walking were "unknown" - but I can't be 100% sure of that.
The thing that really worries me is if this isn't isolated to the troll cave.
