Is it my imagination of has the latest update made the game more unstable -
after installing it, I've had nothing but constant crashes back to the
desktop, computer resets and crashes in granny2.dll, when trying to play a
LAN game. It can happen 5 minutes in a game, or 30 minutes. Sometimes there
is an error message report, although most of the time there isn't.

One of the error logs :

The following information is part of the event: age3.exe, 4.106.831.3341,
granny2.dll, 0.0.0.0, 0002c8cd.
Data:
0000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74 Applicat
0008: 69 6f 6e 20 46 61 69 6c ion Fail
0010: 75 72 65 20 20 61 67 65 ure age
0018: 33 2e 65 78 65 20 34 2e 3.exe 4.
0020: 31 30 36 2e 38 33 31 2e 106.831.
0028: 33 33 34 31 20 69 6e 20 3341 in
0030: 67 72 61 6e 6e 79 32 2e granny2.
0038: 64 6c 6c 20 30 2e 30 2e dll 0.0.
0040: 30 2e 30 20 61 74 20 6f 0.0 at o
0048: 66 66 73 65 74 20 30 30 ffset 00
0050: 30 32 63 38 63 64 0d 0a 02c8cd..

I've reinstalled the game, updated the graphics drivers (X700), turned off
AGP texture acceleration and hardware sound acceleration.
I've got 2GB RAM, Win XP Home.