Sometimes I can get right back in to Empires after the crash, but other times the game starts to load, then crashes again. Other times I can get all the way to calling up the saved game, then before the saved game loads Empires crashes again. Sometimes I can even call up the last save of the game, and play until the game crashes at seemingly the exact same time again, even if I've changed my actions compared to the previous game (e.g., not moving any of my units into position to kill enemy units).
I've done a clean boot, even exiting a few extra Microsoft programs in addition, I have the lasted drivers for the Nvidea Geforce card and Audigy sound card, a brand new Sony Viao machine with a Pentium 4 3 Ghz and 512 megs of RAM and Windows XP, I've done everything in the Microsoft Knowledge Base to improve game play (rebuild page file, various video settings, etc.), I've tried setting everything in Empires to its lowest setting (sound off, no autosave, low resolution, etc.), all in various permutations and combinations. No luck whatsoever; I can't trace it to any one item. Clean boot or no clean boot, resolutions high or low, sound on or off, autosave on or off, saving the scenario and saved games with different names, you name it I've tried it. The only clue is that after each crash, a new Notepad document, with a size of 0 megs, is placed in the Empires folder. Since it is 0 megs, nothing comes up when I click on it.
Love the game while it runs, but getting to the point where Empires will migrate to the closet with those other never played games.