Similar to this issue but it's not the entire computer locking up; I just get a black screen (with a sword cursor) and a repeated short burst of noise.

I'm running Win7 Ultimate, 64-bit edition, on an Intel Core2 quad-core processor. Some of the other threads here have mentioned core affinity issues on multiple-core processors, but I wasn't able to find a copy of imagecfg.exe to try setting the affinity. Can anyone offer a pointer and/or additional advice for troubleshooting this issue?

You can set core affinity on your games shortcut target line.

Right click on shortcut and go to properties. Then on the Target line:

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C start /affinity 1 C:\(ProgramFolder path)\(program).exe