I install the game and it plays the opening movie, then I get to my cell. I walk around for about 20 seconds then the game freezes. Its happened about 4 times now. I have a Windows XP with 2.49 ghz and a gig of ram. The same error message comes up every time which is the image attached. Can anyone help me get this to work?
Sorry for making two topics, one of them lagged out while I was making it so I didnt think it posted, and now i cant delete it the topic.

same problem here running on Windows 7 64-bit. Game plays fine for as long as 10 mins sometimes, then crashes with a "sntrm has stopped working" message. REALLY frustrating.
Can anyone help?

Just got the following reply from GOG:
Hello,
I'm afraid we don't support Windows 7 yet. We have launched this game on the RC1 version of Windows 7 earlier, though, and found no problems with random crashes...
Work on Windows 7 compatibility is currently ongoing and we will make an official announcement once all Win7-compatible installers are prepared and uploaded. In the meantime we will not claim that our games work under that operating system. Until all our games are ready, however, I'm afraid I'm unable to properly recreate the problem and provide you with a solution...
I would suggest trying different compatibility settings and using the "Run as Administrator" option. Also, please make sure all your drivers are the latest WHQL-certified version. If needed, please try consulting our forums, as there are many of our users are Windows 7 users there, some of which may provide some useful insight.
Regards,
...
This is obviously not a Windows 7 exclusive issue though - many people reporting the problem on Vista & XP too.

Has anyone managed to play through the game with no problems?
I have to say this is putting me off buying any more games from GOG.

The problem with crashing is not only a GOG version issue, also the boxed verison has problems.
I don't really remember how I got through it - think maybe it had something to do with muting sound in the areas that crash..

Yes, I just finished it this evening. I'm running XP Professional Service Pack 3. I didn't encounter any crashes, freezes, or other problems.

For me, it didn't freeze as fast, but after two or three minutes playing. Then I searched for some tips, and found in a forum (sorry I don't remember which) a simple solution which worked for me (XP SP2): find the dxdiag.exe tool in the windows\system32 folder, execute it and disable directdraw. That simple. I don't even set compatibility mode. Hope it works. I've been playing for hours without crashes. What a game.

Thank you Johnny, I finally have got Sanitarium working. But disabling the DirectDraw acceleration didn't work, so I disabled the Direct3D acceleration instead, and set the compatibility to Windows 98 which worked out perfectly. Loving this game so far too

Ahh scratch that last post.. I'm in that town with all the kids and it keeps randomly freezing.

It froze for me too, after that, in another phase. Now I've set the acceleration to zero (game settings menu) and it worked. I don't know how long... Good luck. And Merry Xmas!

Yeah I tried setting the acceleration to zero too. I also tried something I found on other forums which is to open up multiple applications while playing the game (in conjunction with disabling 3D directdraw/etc), and i've been playing it for about an hour straight with no crashes whatsoever... I opened up 3 along with sanitarium: Mozilla firefox, msn messenger and Scummvm. That seems to be working you should try that out, good luck with that. Merry xmas to you too man.

Well, strangely enough, it works with other apps open (directx disabled etc). Tks a lot Coldwater!

Here's what worked for me: To prevent the game from crashing I use the MS DirectShow SDK CPU Grabber, which slows down the computer but apparently makes the crashes not happening anymore.
Here's the site where I found that tool: http://www.reocities.com/kulhain/ (Reocities seems to be some kind of archive for the now defunct Geocities service of Yahoo). Look for "CPU Grabber". That's the only place where I found that tool, and this is the only tool that had been mentioned in two or three other forums to fix that issue with Sanitarium. But it could be that this works with other CPU slowdown tools as well. Anyway, with this one I haven't had a single freeze up.
The flickering cursor is still very present though, so additionaly to using CPU Grabber I have to disable DirectDraw acceleration as well.
Maybe the GoG guys could look into this and implement this two "fixes" (temporarily disable DirectDraw acceleration and slow down the CPU on startup) into a future patch.

Tks, Swordfishbone, I'm using CPU Grabber and the game is working just fine. I'm running sntrm.exe directly, also.