Steam: Lockup, forced to restart computer

[Houdani]

Ditto, same problem here.

Bought from Steam on 3 May 09. Crashes every 10 minutes or less. Entire computer freezes and requires a hard reset to recover. Am unable to ALT+TAB or ALT+F4 or CTRL+ALT+DEL to escape the game.

So far, it's only been happening outside of combat. It seems to freeze most often when there is a dialog window open such as when I pick up loose gold on the map or when talking to a vendor/quest giver.

I first thought it was related to overheating my video card, but I manually set all fans in my rig to 100% (case, CPU, GPU) and the problem did not go away.

I have not encountered any crashes like this in any other game.

System Specs:
WinXP Home SP3
AMD Athlon 64 XP 4400+ socket 939 @ stock speeds
2GB DDR RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT
Shuttle SN25P case (with their custom power supply and motherboard)
On board audio with Via Envy24 codec

Yeah, I know. It's way past time to upgrade.