Namur: Ok, i haven't installed yet, but i did find this, on the ubi forums on a post by cydian, regarding the 'crash when trying to save' problem.
"Apparently, when Riven installs itself on your harddrive, it sticks itself into a Read-Only folder. Why, I don't know. Attempts to change the security settings are fruitless...for some reason it changes itself back automatically.
So this is what I did, and it works.
First, create a new folder in C:\Program Files (assuming that's where you installed Riven). Copy over everything from inside your Riven directory (BUT NOT THE FOLDER CALLED "DATA") to this new directory.
Inside your new directory, create a folder called "Data" (without the quotes). Go into the Data folder inside your Riven directory and copy/paste everything from that into your New Folder/Data directory. Run the game from there, and you should be able to save and load with no problem."
The full thread is
here another solution would be to save in a different folder thats what i do with the original release of riven on xp