Also, I narrowed down the problem. The "hang till it crashes" event only happens when I'm running the game in fullscreen. When I'm in windowed mode, it makes it to the character select screen just fine.
That still leaves me with a problem, though, because when I use the widescreen mod it forces the game into fullscreen mode. So unless I can find a solution for the root of the problem, it looks like I'm going to be stuck running at 800x600
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