Crashing during for diplomacy screens

[Jaxian]

Civilization 4 is consistantly crashing when another nation contacts me for diplomacy. I have to imagine that rendering the other nation's character portraits is causing the crashes, and sometimes the character appears to have a few unrendered or stretched polygons just before the crash.

I have tried several methods of fixing the problem, but I haven't come up with one that works yet. I've got a 2.66 Ghz pentium processor, 1 GB of RAM, and an ATI Radeon 9550 (I was running a GeForce, but I bought this one hoping it would fix the problem) running the newest Omega Drivers (these are third-party drivers that someone recommended in a different thread. They appear to be working better than the ATI Catalyst drivers, but the game is still crashing).

I suspect the problem might be related to using an AGP card instead of a PCI card, since I have two other, slower computers running PCI video cards which seem to be avoiding crashes.

Okay, well that was just a lot of information leading up to the question: has anyone experienced and fixed this problem?

 

[AngryBrent]

My game tends to run fine up until somebody tries contacting me, then it slows down consideradably, making the game nearly impossible to play. It might be the same problem.

 

[ill_i_bus]

hey this happens to me too! everything runs fine on my souped up 256mb nvidia, 2.6ghz (oc'd) sandiego cpu, 1gig of pc5700ram! dfi board. although, out of a 500gb hdd, only 21gb is free,lol. but still games runs fine.. UNTIL someone contacts me for diplomacy, then the games move really slow and choppily if u want to move around. anyway to turn off diplomacy animations?