Last ditch attempt at a fix (long post)

[scalelokt]

Hello fellow commanders. I've reached a point in GWX where I'm having trouble getting into the game. My last topic was "The Great Escape" which described my most recent patrol and about the most fun I've ever had playing SH3 / GWX. Well as soon as I got away I saved my game because I was still in mid patrol and just didnt have time to wrap things up during that session. I come back to load it, and the game crashes within 5 minutes every time. I simply can not save my game be it submerged, surfaced, ships around me, no ships around me, etc. Really the only way I can play is to do an entire patrol at a time. Between work, the band I'm in, the girlfriend, etc. its hard for me to have that kind of time, especially since I like to take my sweet time every patrol (manual targeting and all that). It's getting to the point where I don't want to play because its almost a sure thing I will lose all the progress I've made when I save. What I'm experiencing is a CTD with no error message.

So to make this as short as I can, here are my system specs and what fixes I have attempted so far (from searches in this forum)

1. I always save surfaced with no ships in range (though I get the same CTD either way)
2. I have tried a variety of installations, with and without GWX, once on Vista once on XP, with and without SH Weather, pretty much every combination of mods on and off yields the same problem.
3. Other games are stable and running well, including intensive games like Oblivion, Call of Duty 2, Splinter Cell Double Agent, etc.

A brief rundown of my system:
Nvidia 6800GT OC video card (AGP 8x)
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy ZS Platinum Pro
3 Ghz Pentium 4, 800 FSB, Hyper Threading enabled
2 gigs RAM (recently upgraded from 1.5 gigs, but the crashing happened before and after)
Currently using Windows XP Professional with all updates (have same problems with Vista Home as well)
I have the latest drivers for everything.

I think thats a good place to start. I'm not going to give up on SH3, I like it too much. But I'm sure you all can understand, this is getting frustrating so I'm open to any ideas you all might have. I have searched the forum a lot and have found all kinds of suggestions for fixes but none have worked so far. Also sorry to bother you all with this, I try to keep tech issues out of forums like this, the company should be responsible, but you all seem knowledgeable about this stuff and ubisoft has little in the way of support for this game. All I have been able to get is that this is a bug that came with the stock version and there were never any definite fixes for it. I hope thats not the end of the story right there.