Quote Originally Posted by BigBZ
Thanks for the suggestions guys!

@rotorgun: the game install was RTW:BI (ie 1.3/1.4) with no mods. Only RTW was crashing, BI worked fine. I assume BI has a slightly different battle engine (?)

Since I needed to reinstall windows anyway I did that and had a totally clean RTW install to work with.
The error seems to be caused by DirectX 9.0b (installed from the RTW cd), as I had a the same crash after the windows reinstall. Having made sure the vid drivers were as up to date as possible (with no change in crashes) I then upgraded DX to 9.0c and the problem goes away.

Thanks again
Bz
As far as the battle engine, I have no idea. Just another dumb question, but are you by any chance using Windows ME? I had many similar crashes when running Total War games when using this operating system. It is only designed to handle a max of 512 meg of Ram in its cache. I also upgraded my video card from a 64 meg to a 128 meg Radeon 9200 AGI one. Is the card your using compatible with the minimum requirements listed on the gamebox?
I also found far less problems when I finally upgraded to Windows XP.

Good luck,