I tried rolling back to 1.0 instead of 1.0b. In fact, for the second stage (single core affinity and single card), I had reinstalled the game and was working from 1.0.
As for older graphics driver, I'm not sure why that would help, and I don't want to mess up the rest of my system for other tasks/games, so that's not really an option.
Afraid this is still an ongoing problem.
I was able to get some level of stability from the game, for a time, by 1) disabling my 2nd graphics card in device manager and 2) running the game with affinity set to just one processor. This way I could usually play for a couple of hours, uninterrupted.
Or so I thought.
First of all, "uninterrupted" means the game wouldn't crash my entire system without warning or any error message (at least not until after a few hours of gameplay). But it would freeze on me at random intervals, usually for 3 to 5 seconds, and then resume as if nothing had happened. Initially I thought this was related to entries to new areas, etc. But, upon paying closer attention, not so. It does it randomly, even while walking around in the middle of an area with no enemies.
Would really like to fix this. I tried running the game completely dummed down on the graphics settings, still get the exact same freeze issue...
Secondly, in order to address the freeze/hang issue, I decided to install the new latest drivers from ATI for my cards (they just came out on 8/20). I had to completely uninstall my existing drivers, and the catalyst control panel, in order to install the new package.
As I mentioned, I was hoping this would resolve the freeze/hang issue.
Nope. Now I am back to square one, with the game completely crashing the entire system again, within the first few minutes of gameplay.
Again, tried running with graphics settings completely dummed down, no difference. Somehow it makes me wonder if the "uninterrupted" period was just a fluke, and whether the single core affinity and disabled 2nd graphics card have anything to do with the issue.
If anyone has any other ideas, or is able to play Kotor II on a multi-core system with ATI (preferrably 3870) graphics card, would sure appreciate your insight.