Far Cry 2 - Crashing like clockwork

[linkin]

Every hour or so, the game crashes to desktop with no error. Just before it crashes it gets real laggy. about 5 mins before the crash, i get the "big black box" that appears when you do certain things... i get when i have an RPG, look straight up and then use iron sights.
It's really annoying me becuase i didn't save once in the whole hour i was playing... other times i've saved and then it crashes before i do anything major.
I suspect this is an issue with poorly written DX10 code, because the game doesn't crash in DX9 at all. Game is patched to V1.03 and Catalyst is up to 9.8
I tried the ATI/AMD hotfix but it said everything was up to date. I'm enjoying the game again once i got up to 45% done.

Ubi really needs to work on 2 things:
1) making games that do not crash consistently
2) making their games interesting before half beating the game

Other than that, its a fun game.
Is there any way to stop these annyoing crashes without reverting to DX9? I've tried all possible combinations of settings, resolutions and refresh rates.

EDIT: just went to Ati site and the catalyst 9.9 is out! go d/l it and lets see if it fixes anything

EDIT2: The new drivers are giving poor performance in FC2. I am yet to test them in other games.

 

[Aastii]

in quite a few games codecs can cause issues. Fallout 3 is a good example, it crashes every few minutes if you have certain codecs in, and in some cases if you have ANY codecs in.

Try uninstalling all of them and see if you get any luck form there

 

[linkin]

The new drivers seem to have stopped the crashing. when i think its about to crash i always save now. but since 9.9 drivers whenever i think its going to crash and hangs for 2 seconds then goes choppy then normal.