Sacred 2 starts up to the menu screen just fine. I choose the Load Character option and it acts like it's loading for the normal amount of time and then the whole application just dies with no error message. I've been playing that character for a while.

I started a new game with a different character and that character loads just fine.

I'm playing the game on a Windows XP machine. There are no patches or mods installed, just the base GOG version of the game.

This exact same thing happened a couple of years ago. That time I had installed the community patch. I had made some pretty poor upgrade choices and wasn't very happy with my character (in the game) so I wasn't too broken up about it then.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

It's not easy to tell what is causing the crash, but maybe your character save file has become corrupt.
I think you could try opening it with the Sacred 2 Character Editor, saving it without any modification and then loading it again in game.

Thank you for the suggestion, but no luck. I even tried again and made a small change (gave myself 1 extra Gold), but it still crashes.

I looked through all the character settings in the editor and everything seemed correct.

Well, I was probably wrong and the character save file is fine.
The problem is I'm running out of ideas: many users reported crashes in later Windows versions, but the game should work correctly on Windows XP. In fact it does run correctly until you try to load that character: and that's why I firstly thought that the character itself could cause the problem.

My next suggestion is to try deleting the game's temporary files. Here you can find a tool to automatically do that, or you can wipe them manually (but I'm not sure where you can find them).
Maybe there is some problem in the game cache and that's why the game crashes when you load your character.

It was worth a try, but still didn't fix it.

Again, thanks for taking the time to give some suggestions.

You are welcome, but now I'm afraid I can't help you any further, sorry.

I suggest you to try asking for help in the (unofficial) game's forum.

I looked through the Troubleshooting forum there and actually found three different threads that sounded like they had the same problem. Apparently, no one knows how to fix this.

Someone did point out that you can switch the character to a different difficulty level, then you still have access to that character/equipment/chest. Since my only choice is Bronze, and you have to restart the game when switching difficulties, I'm not sure how much that helps. I'm not interested in playing through on easy mode and Silver is forever going to glitch for that character. I guess I could save out whatever equipment I wanted into the Shared chest and restart another character in Silver.

It sounds like the general consensus on the way to deal with this issue is to regularly back up your save, then if it happens you can restore a previous save. That 's common-sense advice in general, but one of my main talents is learning things the hard way.