Hello,
I've tried to fix this myself and with the help of others over on the steam forums. I even contacted Swen and to my surprise he replied to me and tried to provide help but since twitter is bad for discussing potential fixes I've decided to make a forum post. I'm not the only one who experiences this behaviour (I'm actually not sure that this is a bug) although only a few people seem to be affected by it.
Here are some of the steam discussions which talk about this issue:
Discussion 1Discussion 2Discussion 3 I've got either one or two issues since there are two types of crashes:
1: A crash back to desktop:
If this happens a crashdump file is generated and I can send a bug report through the provided tool. I've looked inside the crashdump file and the reason it crashes seems to be that the game tries to access an address without having the permission to do so.
2: A crash which kills my rig:
This happens most of the time after I select the difficulty and the game switches to a loading screen. During that screen the mouse starts to stutter and the music begins to loop. I can't do anything from that point and after a while everything freezes. A restart is the only option I've got after this. Because of that no crashdump file is generated and I can't provide the support with one.
On a side note: The farthest I've made it was finishing character creation. It killed my rig during the loading screen that followed it ;(
What I've tried:
Drive updates, run as admin, deleting the DOS folder under documents as well as downloading the provided one from the troubleshooting thread Swen provided, selective startup, removing xbox controller as well as other not necessary usb devices, verifying local files several times, a memtest86 (only 4 passes which took 2hrs) since the problem hinted at a memory one and I thought my RAM might be faulty.
The strange thing is that the ea version worked for me. I tried some things in the ea version a few hours before the full release and everything worked fine.
System specs:
OS: Windows 10 Pro
CPU: i7-2600k @ 3.4ghz
Graphics Card: Geforce 580GTX
RAM: 8gb
I would add my dxdiag and the two recent crashdump files but I can't find an option to attach those. If needed I can upload those somewhere.