I bought Riven about a month ago, and I came across the crashing when saving bug, but by turning off the compatibility I was able to alleviate the issue. Now the game crashes at seemingly random intervals and I have to stop the process each time this happens.
My computer is running 64 bit Windows 7 Ultimate, if that helps.

When you had the crash when saving bug did you try running the game as an administrator first? If you have installed this game to program files it will try putting its saves in the games folder so needs admin permission to do so.
If you didn't it might be worth trying to put the compatibility settings back to what gog set them as and then running the game as admin by right clicking the shortcut and selecting the admin option and then seeing if it crashes when you save or not.

I believe the compatibility was set to windows 95. If I set it to that the game crashes if I try to open a save game. The only ones that seem to work at least when it comes to saving and loading are any above Windows XP.
The only thing that happens during these crashes is the mouse cursor disappears, sometimes the sound disappears too and I have to kill the process.

I have the same problem on windows XP Professional. Can anyone help, please?

Initially I experienced the game crash when trying to save, but I:
- Deleted Microsoft Office Groove from Office 2007
- Renamed the Riven directory and created another desktop shortcut
- Reset the compatibility to from Windows 95 to Windows 98
This all fixed the saving rpblem but now I'm getting these constant game crashes happening randomly.
I save as I go through the game, but sometimes the game crashes during a save and I can;t reopen the previously accessible saved file.
I'm playing Riven, purcahsed from GOG 27 Jan 2013, on Windows Vista.

I also bought the Riven game here and am having the same 'freeze on save' issue as a lot of people. I am not computer savvy enough to follow some of the suggestions for fixes made because i don't know what you are talking about. I do have the game on disk that I ordered a long time ago. But it is a designated OS of Win95 and I have XP. Is there any way I can d/l it from the disk in XP? I am willing to learn. For instance, one of the suggestions was to rename the directory containing the game. How do you do that?