Sid Meier's Pirates Crashes after first battle!

Howdy,

I've installed the patch, and running Pirates at first SEEMS to pose no
problems for me. All the intro movies run, I get into the game and
arrive at the first town. I leave town and cruise around and can
attack another ship. The battle goes fine, but after loading the
booty, the game goes back to the map screen, I begin turning my ship
around, and . . . crash. It doesn't seem to matter if I keep the
captured ship or sink it.

Now, I am running a P4 Dell computer (yes, I know, with the onboard
graphics adaptor), but it runs everything nice and smooth right up to
the point where it crashes! (P4 with 512megs). Sometimes I will get
an error message, but it just states:

modname: ntdll.dll
offset: 0001e58
ModVer 5.1.2600.2180

I've double checked the dll file and it is fine and the most up-to-date
version.

Any ideas?

Ah, nothing like replying to one's own posting.

Just in case someone else runs into the same trouble, here's what to do
(from a Pirates site): Set all of your in-game video settings to their
highest settings. The game will probablly run fine after that, and
even if your video card isn't quite up to snuff, the game will still
run smoothly without crashing. I don't get it, but it works.