Rise of Nations: Thrones and Patriots - CRASHING!

Hey guys. I'm having a rough time with this expansion pack for Rise of
Nartions.

Basically, after a completly random amount of time in the game, one of
three things will happen:

1. The game will freeze and my computer will stop responding

2. The game will suddenly exit and a window will popup saying
"Gathering exception data", followed by a request to send an error
report

3. I get a blue screen filled with garbled text (this happened for the
first and only time just this morning)

I read recommendations to get the latest version of the game and all my
device drivers, which I have now done. Sadly, the game is still
crashing on me. Does anyone have any other ideas?

Kind regards,

Matt

SYSTEM SPECS:

CPU: AMD Athlon XP2000+ (1.7GHz)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-7VAX (VIA KT400 chipset) motherboard
RAM: 1.25GB PC2700 RAM (Crucial)
Graphics card: Conect 3D Radeon 9550 256MB AGP Graphics card
Sound card: Creative SB Live! 5.1 PCI
Hard Drive: Western Digital WD800JB 80GB 7200rpm
Monitor: Medion C12 19" LCD running at 75Hz in 1024x768 32bit
resolution
Mouse: Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer 3.0 USB