I've seen that happen with other Lithtech Engine based games in the past (Tron 2.0, the NOLF games). Unfortunately, there are several possible causes. It could be your anti-virus being overly aggressive with its scans, it could Windows DEP randomly deciding to interfere with the executable (hence why I just disable the whole thing myself), it could be a corruption in one or more of the game files, believe it or not, it actually could be a personal firewall interfering with the game in some way. I'm sure there are other possible causes, but those are the most common. The anti-virus, DEP and firewall are easy to confirm/fix; simply turn them off individually then try the game to see if the error happens. When the game works, you'll know which one is causing the problem. The corrupted file one involves uninstalling, deleting leftover files then reinstalling. Given that you are seeing a performance loss before the error message, the first place I would check is your anti-virus. If it is trying to scan files at the same time the game is trying to load or use those files, it would cause a significant performance loss.
