I've had a similar problem during the first couple of times after I install the game or a mod (or I jsut finally got VI yesterday so that one too). I traced it down to a problem with Norton Internet Security. It doesn't allow MTW to access the internet and when it does it's little pop up to request instructions, it's such a resource hog that it swamps the game and crashes it. If you have norton running shut down the firewall for 5 minutes, KEEP EVERYTHING ELSE ON!!!!. This should allow you to get further than the menus and for some reason during the main campaign map it won't crash form this. Just tell norton when it asks to always allo MTW to access the Internet.