Thank you, and you're right, the changes there are insignificant.

You don't by any chance have Nero Burning Rom installed, or Free Download Manager? I know that these interfere with EB, but possibly other programs do too. If you're willing to post information about which other software you've installed, we could see if there is some match with other people who have had problems.

You should try to stop all non-essential processes (including Windows services) and then try to run EB. Perhaps there is something interfering there.

Another way to find out if it's a software conflict would be to install a second Windows (parallel to the usual one you've got) and run EB from that (no new RTW/EB installation would be needed). Then no other installed software would be interfering, but I won't ask you to go through that big boring process unless you're desperate to play EB custom battles.

I would ask you to check your hardware with Memtest and Scandisk, but it doesn't seem relevant as it always crashes in the same place... Faulty memory would cause random crashes instead, and a bad disk block should turn up in the validation. I know that StoneAndBlood had consistent crashes due to some weird hardware conflict however, and that was (weirdly) fixed by cutting away all our voicemods from his installation. This is not a trivial thing to do however.