idonthavetimefor: This exact thing is happening to me. DEP did not do a thing for me though.
Hello. I recently started playing Patrician 3 again and ran into the same issue on Windows 10. Thankfully it doesn't happen too often.
I've seen two different issues cause this problem. One appears to be a bug within the game itself. The other appears to be a graphics issue. I captured two memory dumps of the game so far. Here are the errors:
0:000> .exr -1
ExceptionAddress: 0041cc52 (Patrician3+0x0001cc52)
ExceptionCode: c0000005 (Access violation) << error message
ExceptionFlags: 00000000
NumberParameters: 2
Parameter[0]: 00000000
Parameter[1]: 00000000
Attempt to read from address 00000000 << invalid address
0:000> .exr -1
ExceptionAddress: 6c87e23f (apphelp!DirectDrawSurface<IDirectDrawSurface *,_DDSURFACEDESC,_DDSCAPS,IDirect3DDevice2 *>::Blt<long (__stdcall*)(IDirectDrawSurface *,tagRECT *,IDirectDrawSurface *,tagRECT *,unsigned long,_DDBLTFX *)>+0x000000ac)
ExceptionCode: c0000005 (Access violation) << error message
ExceptionFlags: 00000000
NumberParameters: 2
Parameter[0]: 00000000
Parameter[1]: 00000054
Attempt to read from address 00000054 << invalid address
As you can see, c0000005 is the error code for an access violation. In both cases, the game was trying to read from memory addresses that were invalid. 00000000 and 00000054 are not real memory addresses, so the game crashed.
You can try right-clicking on the game executable (patrician3.exe) and try different compatibility modes (Win98, WinXP) and see if that helps. I've just been trusting it to luck. My luck has been pretty good so far. Your mileage may vary.