BI crashes on battle map load.

I searched around for an answer for this but couldn't find one so here goes:

Ok, so I picked up BI today and started up a campaign.
Playing on the strategy screen everything was fine and I went into a battle. But when it went to the loading screen for the battle the loading bar extended all the way to the right of screen and then it just sits there. No ctrl-alt-del works, no alt-tab or anything. I had to reset to be able to gain access to the computer again.

What could this be? My specs are:

AMD x2 4400 dualcore (i've tried disabling one of the cores for the game with the same result)
2 gig
geforce 7800GTX OC with the latest nvidia drivers.

Any help on this is greatly appreciated.

Again, if I missed an obvious answer to this I sincerely apologize.

Regards