The game keeps crashing anywhere in the game. In menus, in dialog, in cinematics.
Never twice at the same place.
Is there anything to ease the ride, it's quite rough at this moment.

I am having random crashes too. I set a support request to gog.
One tip, run the game in win98 compatibility mode. That seems to help a little. The game used to crash constantly before. Now it crashes only now and then. Still randomly, still annoying, but at least the game is playable if I save often and load after crashes.
Also I shut down all other running processes that I can, just in case.
Hope this helps.
Update:
The most stable combination that I found ( or at least that seems to crash less often ) is to run in win98 compatibility mode with the options 256 colors and 640x480 screen res.
Running in windowed mode -w does not work for me as the game runs at a very low frame rate and is not very playable.

For me it began seemingly randomly, and I was able to get further each time, but after the first in-chapter video, it crashes consistently.
Win 98, 256, 640x480 doesn't change this result.
edit: neither does windowed mode from the command line

Indeed, settings compatibility mode to win98 and checking all other box prevented the crash from happening. Weel, they didn't occured.
I tried win95 but I got a runtime error at the end of "the cave" chapter (just after killing the squid thing and just before entering the mansion).
Switching to win98 fixed the runtime error and the crashes.
I need to play further to see if the crashes are indeed history.

Constant crashes on my Netbook Asus 1000 also. I will go ahead and try the Win 98 compatibility to see what happens. Hope it works as just from seeing the first 2 minutes of this game I have been sucked in - great sound and production values.

The latest update to the Sanitarium installer seems stable so far. I have managed to play an entire session without a single crash. Of course since the crashes were random it's hard to tell if the problem is resolved, but I will keep testing.
Many thanks.

Guys I tried changing to Windows XP compatibility (using Windows 7) but then the game couldnt find any game saves and started as a new game. What's up with that?

I have reached chapter 8.
Random crashes with the game still persistent, but they seem to happen a lot more now in chapter 8.
I am using the latest downloadable version from GOG and running the game in win98 compatibility mode with the options 256 colors and 640x480 screen res.

I have managed to finish the game. Even with the latest GOG version and with all the suggestions in the forums, the game was crashing constantly. The most crashes I had were in chapter 1, 8 and 9.
The only way to play the chapters was to save the game every few seconds, then restore the game on crash. The game would crash every 2-3 minutes on those chapters.
On other chapters there were few to no crashes.
I hope GOG manages to fix these errors for the sake of other players. Sanitarium is a beautiful game and it's a pity that players can't experience it as it was intended.
Many thanks

^ Exact story from me too (and OS).

Here's what worked for me: To prevent the game from crashing I use the MS DirectShow SDK CPU Grabber, which slows down the computer but apparently makes the crashes not happening anymore.
Here's the site where I found that tool: http://www.reocities.com/kulhain/ (Reocities seems to be some kind of archive for the now defunct Geocities service of Yahoo). Look for "CPU Grabber". That's the only place where I found that tool, and this is the only tool that had been mentioned in two or three other forums to fix that issue with Sanitarium. But it could be that this works with other CPU slowdown tools as well. Anyway, with this one I haven't had a single freeze up.
(posted this in another thread before, but I guess people forgive me for being repetitive)