Deitrus - I do not know why, but this seems to have greatly improved my crashes... before I would crash in a test league 4 out of 5 times... now I can crash my system at will (or not)
Markus, Henry, Steve, Sporr.... please take note:
I can now crash my games AT WILL.
Here is what I noticed. After performing all the tasks as Deitrus has outlined, I decided to test the game. So far I have played 20 games, and I crashed only once. But I did notice something with the game that crashed in regard sound... so I recreated that instance and low and behold my game crashed again. I tried it again - and it crashed again. I then avoided the sound issue, and the game was successful.
What I noticed is that every now and then when playing a game the "background crowd loop" is almost silent - you can barely hear it. When this happens, if I sim a game to the 9th inning or finish the game it has ALWAYS crashed - 100% successful crash rate. Now... if during the game the crowd background loop suddenly pops up to full volume (which normally will happen around the 2nd inning) and THEN I sim the game to the end - no crash 100% of the time.
So I can now make my system crash simply be listening to what the background crowd loop will do....
This is on XP Pro SP2, DX9.0c, P4, 512MB and tons of free HDD space....
(Thanks Deitrus... I will continue to test the league out to make sure there are no other rogue crashes, and that indeed I can control the crashing by listening to the background loop! I may finally be able to turn sound on again!)