After reading this thread:

http://www.larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=476158#Post476158

which appeared similar, I disabled my firewall and tried again.

the pattern remained essentially the same as prior attempts until the end.

Where previously when the program crashed, the screen would turn black for a second or two before bringing up the desktop and the "application has crashed" dialog box.

This time the screen went black for nearly a minute, and when it did return to the desktop, I still had the "arrow" mouse cursor from the game, and it took another 30-45 seconds to bring up the "Application crash dialog" at which point the game cursor switched back to a standard windows cursor.