I have experienced this startup crush also. Too bad - Unreal is one of my favourites since 1990-s. System: Win 7 Pro 32 bit, AMD Phenom 2 x 4 3200 MHz, 4 Gygabyte RAM. And I will tell you what helped to launch this game - just make DEP exception in your system. It couldn't prevent game from crashing sometimes during the play, but this game is over 20 years old and, of course, was supposed to run on old machines (Win98, Celeron-2 400MHz, 128Mb RAM, 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 made it run perfectly) I hope this will help)