Movie crash

[The Yeti of 66]

While the game itself runs just fine, every time one of the movies has to load up, the game crashes out and makes my taskbar disappear. I could disable the movies and play it just fine, but that basically removes half the story. How do you fix this?

 

I'm running XP, for reference.

[The Yeti of 66]

Now I'm even more confused. I updated to patch 1.0b, and suddenly it started playing the movies in a windowed mode. I could live with that, so I just kept on playing that way. Now it's back to crashing every time a movie pops up. I tried repatching the game, but it's back to refusing to load movies.