Just to be absolutely sure I left the computer running memtest for 12 hours straight overnight and I can say for certain now that there is NOTHING wrong with my RAM (since they are my most recent purchase they were the prime suspect from the beginning).
I did indeed have Starforce installed so I removed it and fired up Dark Messiah again. No dice I'm afraid.
The thing is that Dark Messiah is the only game that I've had any serious problems with since C&C Generals (and every single piece of hardware has been upgraded since then). Sure, Gothic3 crashes left and right (save game crash) but it does that for everyone (when playing without the latest patch ... long story, don't ask). All other problems or crashes in games that I experience can be traced right back to engine/gameplay bugs in the game code itself and what's more important: The problems happen to a LOT of people (e.g. everyone with an nVidia card or everyone with AMD CPUs, etc.), so either the developers address the problems in a patch or they fold and admit they can't fix the problem at all (e.g. Dungeon Lords).
Usually I'm spared all but the most rudimentary of bugs. Mainly, I guess, because I try to stay away from "experimental" equipment (I use well established hardware producers and always check for compatibility issues before purchase), software (nothing but Zonealarm and AVG running in the background) and drivers (I only use official drivers whenever possible). I also try to maintain a relatively "clean" installation without too much unnecessary eye-candy ("windows blinds" or whatever it is called and the like). Lastly I don't overclock or bother with excessive tweaking unless absolutely necessary. I know a lot of performance can be gained by both but it also comes with a potential price in stability and since I play a lot of games (in average I buy around 2-3 games a month) and a lot of different types of games I'm more inclined to accept less than stellar performance in exchange for fewer problems like the one I'm having with Dark Messiah than a few extra frames per second whenever the system isn't crashing left and right.
With that being said perhaps you can understand why I have been pretty sure from the beginning that it wasn't my rig that has been causing the problems I have with Dark Messiah. However, since most people are now able to play Dark Messiah, albeit many still have performance issues, and I'm still unable to play the game, the previous assumption seems to be incorrect and it would appear that I do indeed have some kind of hardware/software conflict with the game ... but where do I draw the line? I mean, I'm a programmer myself and seeing how the error message is always the same I'm pretty certain that with the source code and a good debugger program I could locate the error within a few hours, but that's because the error occurs consistently on my machine and it obviously doesn't on Arcane's test machines. If they can't reproduce the error there is no way in hell they can fix it outside of stumbling over it be sheer luck and considering that I'm not having unexpected problems with any of my other games I'm boardering on trying to fix something that isn't really broken.
Even IF it turns out to be the sound card then what are my options? Playing the game without sound is out of the question and forking over another $400 to replace an otherwise perfectly fine sound card is also out of the question. So that leaves me with putting the game on hold until my next upgrade and then see if the problem has gone away or hoping that Arcane will figure out the problem in a future patch ... neither one sounds ideal to me
*edit*
My BIOS doesn't have the "PCI Delayed Transaction" or the "PCI Latency Timer" options so I couldn't do much with them but the AGP Aperature size was set to the amount of RAM of my video card which is 256. Just to be safe I tried it on 128 but it made no difference in DM.
I also tried to disable my sound card in the hardware profile and to be on the safe side I ran DM with the "-nosound" option as well. Pretty dull experience but "fortunately" it didn't make any difference because I still crashed with the same error as before. I know I didn't physically remove the card but I would think that what I did ought to count as the same, right?