I'm having the same issue. Disabling In Game interface for Nvidia GeForce helped once, and then it again stopped working.

I am having the same issue - it is also affecting the European scenario starts on Imp1.

The crash is always the same, the game starts and allows you to pick a nation and start the game, but as soon as you close the first newspaper screen it crashes to desktop.

This is a very recent bug as both games were running perfectly well just last week.

Turning On DEP helped me. I'm on WIndows 11. Official support gog page shows how to turn it on.

Yeah I've had the same issue for like 3-4 years now. I still have the original CD from 1999. Both on that install as well as the GOG version the game crashes as soon as I open a map.

I've turned off DEP, ran every previous Windows version compatibility mode, forced 640x480 resolution, disabled full-screen optimisations, tried all OpenGL GDI compatibility settings in Nvidia control panel, enabled permissions for Windows user account, absolutely all of it and every possible combination of it.

In the Visual Studio debugger the following error codes show up: 0x0B0258D8 and 0xC000041D. The first error code turned up nothing, the second error code gave me results from other applications that were related to .NET Framework functionality and DEP. Based on this I really thought turning off DEP would work but it hasn't.

I really hope someone can come up with a solution for this and I hope that maybe the above can help someone at least solve their own crashing.