I finally got a copy of the game last night and tried it out. It only crashed on me twice - both times when hitting Escape to go from an arcade-mode game to the main menu. But it isn't consistent. I'd be able to do more effective testing if anyone could point out a consistent way to make it crash (although I admit I haven't yet read the other threads so maybe something useful is mentioned somewhere in those)
I was also able to get the "preferred" 320x240 mode by editing the config file to make it use Banked instead of Linear VESA. Strange that the game A) uses VESA for 320x240 and B) goes UP to 640x480 if it can't make the video card switch to the lower-res mode.
I suspect the problem is either with Win2K/XP's DPMI support, or else some quirk in the game that makes it unstable in the NTVDM. The game says it likes 32 or even 64mb of RAM, so it's probably doing some heavy memory grabbing and releasing.
It's too bad they don't port it to the Windows version of Allegro, but maybe Allegro was their problem and they aren't using it in the Linux version anymore.