I've been playing through Soul Reaver 1 and 2 recently, and the same issue occurs in both. Most of the time, when starting either of them, the program will crash immediately upon launch, with a "sr2.exe has stopped working" window. It would do this once or twice before launching properly with Soul Reaver 1, though there would still be random crashes. It was manageable enough, so I finished Soul Reaver 1.

Soul Reaver 2, however, will correctly start maybe 1/30th of the time, and given that save locations are so few and far between, the random crashes are frequent enough that I can't make any progress. I tried startaffinity and a batch file, but neither of these help. I am also running the exe in compatability mode with visual themes disabled, as I heard that would help, but it didn't, so any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Also, the latest crash I had was preceded by the game playing random sound effects one after the other, in case that helps identify the issue at all. Either way, it was pretty funny.

I couldn't reproduce it but I've got mine working after I closed applications like Steam, Fraps (or other overlay apps). Now it works, before that none of the compatibility settings have worked. I don't know but it's worth a try! Close every application you don't need, try browsers, too.

Now my GOG versions runs fine without any compatibility setting.