tanstaafl: OK, the game has been working fine but I suddenly get a crash when I attempt to enter the Police Station in chapter 3. ...
Anyone have any ideas?
For me the solution was really simple:
I started the game again, opened Task Manager, moved to the game's process (something obscure like game32.exe), set the process affinity to one CPU core only, then loaded the latest save game and the scene worked completely normally. No hassle with files or BIOS.
I suspect that this may not work for everyone though, but it's definetily the most simple thing to try first.
( I was running Win 7 at the time. Intel i7 2600k and Radeon 5870.)