Ok, I will start off by saying that this was an unusual crash, and something that is not likely to occur very often.

I have an AMD64 3500+, 1gb RAM, and a Radeon 9800 Pro on an MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (Nforce3 chipset).
I'm running WindowsXP Pro SP2, and my drivers are up to date as of January, and all non-beta.

Before running a game, I had started a download using ReGet Deluxe. It was through a secure HTTPS server, and was downloading at about 500k/s. The download had about a 1/2 hour to go, so I thought that I'd kill some time in GalCiv2

I launched GalCiv2, and loaded my saved game. I noticed that things were a little slower than usual, but there was more disc i/o due to the download. The game started to load, but then crashed to desktop with a windows exception error (first crash, btw...other than this, the game's been perfect!)

My system still seemed a little sluggish after I closed the error message, so I popped open task manager. I saw that ReGet Deluxe was using 98-100% of my CPU, apparently due to the overhead required to manage multiple HTTPS connections.

I paused the download and launched GalCiv2, loaded the game and was able to play. I quit, reactivated the download, saw my CPU usage climb up to 99%, launched GalCiv2, loaded my game, and surprise! CTD. During a normal HTTP (non secure) download, CPU usage only hits about 5%, and GalCiv2 ran fine. In both cases, ReGet was using about 5.5mb of RAM.

As I said, it seems to be a somewhat obscure crash, either a conflict with ReGet (when using HTTPS) or the game didn't like having only 1% of the CPU available to it, something that I can totally understand.