@The General:
I will try the F7 thing and report back, I'm not sure what effect it will have. The doors don't close when I click on Battlestations.
I would suggest you run DbgView and then reenact the CTD. Dbgview will record the code that transpires under the hood, and you'll be able to export it to a document and paste it here (just paste the last part, where you can see that something went wrong and a CTD happened). This will help TDW better understand your problem. I will try doing the same.