not sure what i did to fix it, but this was the sequence of events:

-installed
-ran game. movies loaded and ran fine, party was created fine, but game crashed on loading a new game
-ran setup and changed resolution to 640x480 and turned on the opengl.
-everything ran properly
-ran setup again and changed settings back to default settings
-everything STILL ran properly.

lol, I have no idea what fixed it...Now I can't recreate the crash no matter what I do.