I guess no one has any clues to what might be wrong... It's worth mentioning that even just using plain DirectDraw causes system instability all the same. The game still crashes in the same exact spots under windows, booting in MS-DOS mode with just HIHMEM.SYS loaded and all relevant drivers loaded high results in the game hardly crashing if at all.

So I take it this game is more for MS-DOS than windows even though they have the engine running in DirectX!?

The trouble is - this game is very rare. So - no tests for you.

Well the Demo does the exact same thing, and I'm even mirroring the demo on my dropbox

Debugging this game is a pain in the ass because it runs full screen all the time, and the windower things like DxWnd, D3DWindower tend to screw up the games timing pathway and other things (DxWnd causes the hue to be reversed, i.e. instead of RGB it's BGR) the fact it runs so stable under MS-DOS I've since played and beaten the game under that just fine, but playing the DOS version online is near impossible as it's IPX\Modem\Serial only. And while DirectPlay isn't much better I've proven and someone else on Youtube has proven that it works.