Still can't find it. Would it be possible for you to post several saves from Chapter 17, say at the beginning, and perhaps several minutes in? Thanks!

Here is a quicksave from the beginning of chapter 17. Unpack thiz archive into Cryostasis\Data\Save folder overwriting existing files.

Alright, found your saved game this time. Attempted to load it, and.... same issue I was having, with the same exact error message regarding "too many script variables".

I really don't understand what the issue is with Chapter 17, and ONLY Chapter 17. I swear I haven't had any problems like this with any other chapter, and other than an intermittent and annoyingly low frame rate due to the game's inefficient use of resources, it generally runs fine.

Puzzling... I suggest you do the following:

1) Install AMD Dual Core Optimizer from AMD site.
2) Download and install latest video drivers for XP from nVidia site. Make sure PhysX is updated as well in the process.
3) Go to nVidia Control Panel and set PhysX to be calculated on CPU, not your video card (it helped me in one place in Cryostasis where i got a PhysX error).
4) Run the game and temporarily set all options to low or off, then try to load the save.

If problem persists, uninstalling the game, deleting its folder and reinstalling it and 1.1 patch may also help.

Figures....following your last suggestion seems to have finally resolved the problem, at least for the time being. Just for the record, I've had AMD's dual-core optimizing utility installed and running for several years now, and I do have the latest display drivers from Nvidia as well.

Now that I've got the game running at least, I wanted to see if you have some suggestions for improving the rather abysmal framerates of this resource-hogging game. Here are the settings I'm running the game at now:

I'd hate to lower the resolution, as most games begin looking rather "grainy" below 1280 x 1024. I'm not really certain which of the aforementioned settings is "draining" the most resources on my system, nor do I know if this game is CPU or GPU dependent, or both. On that note, here are my system specs:

In any event, you've been a GREAT help, and I do sincerely appreciate your advice and assistance. Have a great one.

The biggest performance hit comes from Hardware Physics: Off, since all PhysX is being calculated on your CPU which already has much to do in this game and is kinda old already. Set it to On, also set Shaders to 3.0 if available (in theory it may actually boost performance). However, as i said earlier, if you have an error in Cryostasis, setting HW physics to off may help you to proceed.
You have a good video card, but slow CPU. Consider upgrading to modern CPU and motherboard, you should be able to keep other components (except RAM maybe). And install Win7 to use all features of Dx10&11 (however, you'll run into some problems with Creative drivers to keep EAX in games).